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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24398719">Winds of Rebellion</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorate_in_realology/pseuds/doctorate_in_realology'>doctorate_in_realology</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Action &amp; Romance, Action/Adventure, Bending (Avatar), Blood and Violence, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Graphic Description, Humor, Imbalance Comics (Avatar), Kataang - Freeform, Kung Fu, Martial Arts, Mutual Pining, Post-Avatar: The Last Airbender, Post-Canon, Pre-Avatar: Legend of Korra, Slow Burn, The gang dismantles the corporatocracy, They're all in their twenties now but that doesn't mean they don't act like dumbass children, Toph Beifong is an unrepentant bastard, Toph is the only one allowed to say Fuck, Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 03:55:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>54,749</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24398719</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorate_in_realology/pseuds/doctorate_in_realology</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It is the year 107 AG. Aang, Katara, Sokka and Toph are summoned to Cranefish City to help with the growing rift between benders and non-benders, but it becomes quickly apparent that something even more sinister is at play. The situation grows more volatile by the hour, and together, the four friends will uncover a plot that threatens the world with war. In a city gripped by corruption, bigotry and greed, where they can trust no one but each other, they will need more than vigilance to stay alive.</p><p>(This takes place after the events of the show as well as the comics, but it will not rely too heavily on the events of the comics for its context.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aang/Katara (Avatar), Toph Beifong/Sokka</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>91</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>137</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The gang's presence is requested in Cranefish City, a place in which they subverted a bender supremacist uprising five years prior; as they arrive, the reason for their summons becomes quickly apparent; Toph has a confrontation with her father; as night falls, assassins stalk through the shadows.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>EDIT AS OF 08/02/2020: To fix some pacing issues I had with the start of the story, I've rewritten the first chapter a bit and shortened it enough that I've just prepended it to the second chapter, meaning that what was once Chapter 2 is now Chapter 1, Chapter 3 now Chapter 2, and so on.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You remember what we agreed, Avatar, don’t you?”</p><p>“No bending. I remember.”</p><p>The arena, for all its occupants, was a dreadful quiet. Men stood sentinel in the darkened arcades that circumscribed the room, their presence faint in the slatted moonlight. A quick headcount of the men that surrounded him revealed that there were two-dozen</p><p>“I must say,” the man spoke again from the balcony above, “I’m surprised you showed.”</p><p>He was lying, of course; he had given Aang little choice but to come here, to walk willingly into this gauntlet in the dead of night. The man made no note of his fear, but Aang could hear it all the same in the forced steadiness of his breathing—something mimicked less effectively by the men that ambuscaded in the cloaking dark. The arena was no longer quiet.</p><p>“I didn’t want it to come to this,” Aang said. “You know that. We can still resolve this without violence. Tell me where they are and we’ll end this peacefully.”</p><p>The man on the balcony refused with a laugh. “Do you know why people avoid violence, Avatar? Even in the face of evil? Even when it's just? The hard truth of the matter is that it's nothing more than blind selfishness. It’s not about upholding morality, or preserving life—it's about preserving their own misguided principles. Really, what difference does it make whether it's you or someone else that delivers the lethal stroke?” He paused as if expecting a response, though Aang knew it was only to relish in the silence. “But, nevertheless, their outdated modalities linger on, and so their self-righteousness remains untarnished. Just like yours. The Avatar, of all people, should understand this. Selfishness, Aang.”</p><p>“Call it whatever you want. At the end of the day, I just don't see life as something I have the authority to take as I see fit. Guess I'm not vain enough.” Aang's eyes narrowed. “Something I can’t say for you.”</p><p>“How deeply moving," he deadpanned. "I can’t tell if your attempts at pacifism are because you’re about to be beaten to death, or if it’s because of the simple fact of your heritage. That quaint Air Nomad spinelessness—unable to kill for what you believe or who you love.”</p><p>Aang clenched his fists until his fingers ached, until the nails dug crescents into his palms as he recalled the corpses that piled the floor around Gyatso’s body. “I may not kill you. But I don’t have any compunctions about hurting you. Not anymore.”</p><p>“I’ve forfeited that right, have I?”</p><p>“A long time ago.”</p><p>That seemed to please him. With a wave of his hand, the men surrounding Aang stepped forth from the darkness of the arcades and onto the large mat, Aang in its centre. They circled him, assumed their stances. Aang did not move.</p><p>“Remember,” the man on the balcony began again.</p><p>“No bending,” Aang finished. “I get it. Wouldn’t want to have an unfair advantage.”</p><p>The breathing grew louder, less controlled. Rain heaved on the outside walls, seethed in through the slats of the windows and soaked the floor. Somewhere, in the false peace of night, a war was waging.</p><p>Aang exhaled.</p><p>Silence.</p><p>“Begin.”</p><p> </p><p>Water ebbed and wavered beneath Katara like a sheet of rubber. The surface tension had yet to break, nor had the immense concentration she had to maintain in order to keep it that way. With hands steady and weightless, just as she was, she willed the surface of Chameleon Bay to stay static beneath her.</p><p>Tension preservation was, if one wished to grossly oversimplify it, a more graceful version of walking or running on water. Both had to do with the simulation of weightlessness, but the latter was more of a smashing-together, a disruption of the water so that the waves, at the exact moment of collision, might serve as fleeting footholds. The former was the practice of disturbing as little of the natural world as possible. Meditation rather than locomotion. As noble a goal and as peaceful a practice as it was, Katara could not but wonder at its applications.</p><p>“Heads up!”</p><p>But with that, any conclusions she hoped to draw would need to come later.</p><p>Katara’s eyes shot to the sky, and she fell into the water as Sokka plummeted toward her, succinctly and determinately shattering her concentration. She dashed aside, out of his trajectory, and as she returned to the surface she found him plunging into the water where she had been moments before. “You could have killed me!” she shouted.</p><p>He dismissed her with a wave. “You got out of the way in time.”</p><p>If she thought it would get her anywhere, she might have used her attempts at concentration as grounds for reproval, but if she was being honest, she herself was partly to blame for thinking that she could make any significant progress in the presence of the present company to begin with. And if she was being honest still, she wasn’t unhappy for the interruption.</p><p>“Up top!”</p><p>The shout came from above. Silhouetted by the high sun, Aang came down next, nearly right on top of Sokka, who yelped and made a flailing evasion a person could scarcely call an act of swimming. Ample compensation, Katara thought. “You didn’t even try to help me!” Sokka said as the splash subsided. “Your own brother!”</p><p>“You got out of the way in time,” Katara crossed her arms, and her lips upturned in a mocking smile.</p><p>Aang resurfaced between the two of them. “Let’s go again!”</p><p>Katara flicked the back of his head, prompting him to turn. “I was trying to work on my tension preservation, you know,” she said. “Pretty difficult stuff. Requires a lot of concentration.”</p><p>“Boring,” Sokka drawled. “We’re on vacation, aren’t we? Cut loose a little!”</p><p>Aang shrugged in unvoiced assent, his lips parted in a wild grin, and the sight of it was all the convincing she needed.  “Oh, I’ll cut loose, alright.”</p><p>Ever the more observant one, Aang dove beneath the water and darted away, surely seeing the none-too-hidden meaning in her words. Sokka, however, was not as fast, and his indecision was rewarded with a wave half as high as the cliff looming overhead. He washed against the shore, cutting a trench through the sodden sand, and Toph, who had been content to remain there, wasted no time in laughing at his expense.</p><p>Katara did not hear the ensuing exchange as Sokka stood and spat sand from his mouth, shooting a livid glare her way, but that expression was quickly supplanted by something far more mischievous. He pressed a dripping palm to Toph’s stomach, indemnification for her laughter, and she shrieked and coiled up at what was clearly an unexpected cold. Before she could mount her own revenge, he escaped back into the bay where she couldn’t follow, a string of expletives following him instead.</p><p>He made a beeline for the foot of the prodigious slope atop which lay the shelf of rock overlooking the bay, shouting for Aang to follow in what would invariably end in a challenge to see who would be the first of them to reach the top.</p><p>Aang followed him, leaving Katara with a wink, and she moved towards the shore.</p><p>“I’m gonna kill ‘im,” Toph slammed her arms crossed as Katara approached, climbing out of the temperate water.</p><p>Katara obliged her by pulling the water from her clothes with a simple twist of the hand and seated herself next to her. “I’m happy to see them like this. It’s been a while since we’ve had the gang together. We’ve all been so busy.”</p><p>“Haven’t gotten together since Cranefish Town,” Toph confirmed. “Cranefish City, now.”</p><p>“I keep forgetting how much things have changed over there,” Katara wrung some of the water from her hair. “Too bad Zuko couldn’t make it. I can't imagine how busy he is. A nation to run, and all that.”</p><p>“Kinda hard to believe it’s already been eight years since he was trying to kill us.” Toph reached into Sokka’s bag and availed herself of some of the food that constantly occupied it. “Pretty nuts, huh?”</p><p>It rarely occurred to Katara how long ago it really was. To her, it could have been as short as a few months ago that Zuko was their sworn enemy instead of an irreplaceable friend. A few short months ago that everything between those two disparate realities had transpired. All their lives seemed so indelibly wound about that one short stretch of time that everything else fell away from it in blurry spirals.</p><p>“Katara?”</p><p>“Hm?” She snapped back to the shore of Chameleon Bay. “Oh, sorry. You’re right, it is pretty nuts.”</p><p>“Everything alright?”</p><p>“Absolutely. Just crazy how time flies. Everything is changing so fast.”</p><p>Toph slugged her shoulder. “Not everything, queenie.”</p><p>Katara rubbed her arm, but smiled despite it. “I’ve been meaning to ask you—how’d you manage to get away from the academy?”</p><p>“I’m on sabbatical.”</p><p>They laughed, and that was a sound Katara had missed. Ever since quelling the bender uprising in Cranefish, they had hardly had time for one another. Sokka had taken to itinerancy, travelling the world to master his swordsmanship; Toph was raising the next generation of metalbenders with a rather literal iron fist; and Aang and Katara had been doing just about everything in between, putting out fires all over the place. Such was the onus of the Avatar. It made the moment all the sweeter.</p><p>Which is why, as Katara spotted the hawk silhouetted against the sun, a pit formed in her stomach. “You must be joking.”</p><p>“What?” Toph asked, and her answer was the messenger hawk’s shriek, echoing down across the water and back up into the sky, a shrill and foreboding wave.</p><p>It landed at Katara’s side, and it was all she could to not to bat the thing away. A scroll sat in the casing affixed to the harness the thing had been vested with, and she was familiar enough now to know what wind carried the hawk here—what the purpose of the message was, if not the exact words. She took the scroll from the bird’s back and no later than that did it take off into the sky again. With all the trepidation of opening a creaking door, she unfurled the scroll.</p><p>Toph, in her periphery, heard the rattling of the parchment and pricked up her ears. “Messenger hawk? What’s it say?”</p><p>“‘The Business Council of Cranefish City humbly requests your presence, Avatar Aang. Please make haste. Councilman Gato.’”</p><p>“What do you know? Their ears must be burning.”                          </p><p>Katara let the scroll slip to the sand with a grunt of frustration. She wanted to kick it into the bay and let the words disappear in pools of diffusing ink and liquefied pulps of parchment, as if the request that had led to their writing would disappear along with it. “Can’t they just cut us a break? For once?”</p><p>“You’d think they would after the last time we were over there. Thought the ass-kickings we handed out last time were pretty thorough.”</p><p>“I wonder if tensions between benders and non-benders are bubbling up again.”</p><p>“Could be,” Toph rolled a flat stone between her fingers like a coin, “But you can’t solve all those peons’ problems for them. Look, just tell ‘em you need some time off. Seems like every time there’s some dumbass political squabble they come crawling to you two to mediate.”</p><p>“That’s because they do,” Katara leaned back on her elbows, mulling it over in her mind. As much as she and Aang would prefer to tell them to lay off, sending such a message would send a much wider one, a much different one, entirely: that the Avatar would rather spend time gallivanting about with his friends than see to his responsibilities. Far be it for the people petitioning him for help every other day to be possessed of enough self-awareness to see that they were merely calling their own responsibilities his.</p><p>Up high on the diving platform, just beyond earshot, Aang and Sokka appeared. By Katara’s judgement, it had been at the same time, but as was made evident by the ensuing animated conversation, they disagreed. “Get a load of these two,” she said.</p><p>“Want me to get them down?” Toph asked, a palm pressed to the hardpan beneath the sandy shore.</p><p>Before Katara could respond, Toph swept her hand out of the sand, made a fist, and the edge of the diving platform fissured and floated away from the shelf of rock, carrying Aang and Sokka with it. Toph tilted it sideways and dumped them into the bay.</p><p>The pair of them resurfaced on a platform of ice Aang had bent into being. Sokka grabbed him from behind, arched backwards over its edge, and dropped him into the water, shouting some characteristically absurd warcry about a “water tribe suplex.” The platform vanished beneath him in response.</p><p>Katara smiled, failing to recall the last time she had seen either of them like this, which only made her dread the impending conversation even more. She took the scroll from the sand again and waved them down, and if it had been hard to come to terms with having to tell Aang that his short respite was already over, the twin smiles he and Sokka wore made it nearly impossible.</p><p> </p><p>“You sure this is the right way?” Sokka asked.</p><p>“Judging from all the smoke?” Irritation crept at Aang’s voice, and he gripped Appa’s reins a little tighter. “Positive.”</p><p>Ever priding himself on being the one possessed of the strongest sense of direction among their friends, Sokka often teased that he was the only one that could be trusted to know where they were going. It was not unfounded pride—it really was rather impeccable, especially these days—but as Aang watched rolling stacks of black smoke smear the unblighted sky and smelled the acrid, pungent stench of burning coal, he found that he was in an ill temper for it.</p><p>Cranefish City lay below them, sprawling beneath a canopy of blackened clouds. To say that the city’s growth over the years had been exponential would be a hilarious understatement; even by the time of Councillor Liling’s bender supremacist uprising a short five years ago, Cranefish had burst into being from the lone factory and handful of shops that came before it, consuming what had once been an Air Nomad cultural site. Now, like a lake of rust it had spread across the countryside, a city of dark spires. “There’s still time to turn back, y’know,” Aang said as his eyed skated across the tortured landscape. “It’s not right that you guys are getting dragged into this on my account.”</p><p>“Nobody’s dragging anybody,” Toph picked her teeth. “We volunteered.”</p><p>“And you know I appreciate it. A lot. But you know what I mean.”</p><p>“Aang, buddy,” Sokka sat next to him—the force of which earned a grunt from Appa—and slung an arm over his shoulders. “Don’t you smell that?”</p><p>Aand scrunched up his nose. “Sulfur?”</p><p>“No, adventure, man! It’s on the air! What better way to spend time together than on another daring mission? It’ll be just like old times!”</p><p>Aang smiled, but reluctance still pulled his mouth into a thin uncertain line. “I don’t know how daring it will be.”</p><p>“Don’t sweat it. It’ll feel like the good old days again in no time.”</p><p>Sokka’s arm slid off his shoulders, and behind him, he returned to his seat next to Katara. “Just smells like sulfur to me,” she said, her arms crossed. “We’ve barely spent a day together before you’re hauled off to settle some stupid dispute. I mean seriously, you bend over backwards to help people and this is the thanks you get?”</p><p>“Which is why I don’t mind turning back,” Aang said, looking over his shoulder at her, and at Sokka and Toph. “I’m serious. You work harder than anyone, Katara. If anyone deserves a break, it’s you. All of you do. Appa and I can drop you guys off at the Jasmine Dragon, I’ll wrap things up here in Cranefish, and be back before you know it. It’s probably nothing more than a policy dispute or something, anyway.”</p><p>Katara stood, slinging her legs over the saddle’s leather ridge, and sat next to Aang. She looped an arm through his and lay her head on his shoulder, and any frustration he had buried before then vanished. “I just want a little peace and quiet for once,” she said. Her arm tightened around his. “With you.”</p><p>“I know.” He kissed her head, thinking he might set Appa in a nosedive as a reply to the noises of mockery Toph and Sokka were making behind them, and pulled her tighter to his side. “We’ll be out of here before you know it, and any messages we get for the next week, we ignore. Deal?”</p><p>She hummed contentment, and he was glad to see the smile on her face. “Deal.”</p><p>He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe Sokka’s right. It could be fun.”</p><p>They touched down on an unoccupied pier at the city’s port, where they were accosted by the smell of the harbour. Its reeking waves slapped at the sides of moored boats and against the stone walls of the wharf, tossing a stench into the air. They did not linger long.</p><p>Cranefish felt more cramped now, and not just for the denseness of its population. Buildings reared taller, huddled nearer to one another, some even noticeably listing. Despite five years having elapsed since his last visit, it made the city feel taller than Aang remembered it, even though he too had leapt in stature over that same time. It reminded him of Ba Sing Se’s lower ring.</p><p>“Is it just me,” Katara whispered as the gang carefully picked their way through the city’s congested streets, “or does everyone seem sort of on-edge?”</p><p>“I feel great,” Sokka said. “How about you, Toph?”</p><p>“Eh, y’know.”</p><p>“I meant everyone else,” Katara gestured to the sidewalks. Subtly, as if sudden movements would send them scurrying.</p><p>“You’re right, Katara,” Aang said. “Things do seem tense. And I think I know why.”</p><p>He shouldered through the crowd, muttering pardons at each person he passed too closely, all of them packed loosely around a square and stealing glances at the two men who were bullying the owner of a fruit stall. Both of them were clad in armour.</p><p>“How’s business, Shang?” Aang heard one of them ask in a voice bereft of sincerity as he reached the plainly carved fountain in the square’s centre. The man’s palm rested on the pommel of the sword hanging at his waist.</p><p>The stall owner shrunk, eyes darting. “Oh. Good evening, officers. Uh, business is—business is good. I suppose.”</p><p>“Glad to hear it.” The second man stepped closer, his chestplate almost colliding with the stall owner’s nose. “You know, you seem awful nervous for someone answering a pretty simple question.”</p><p>“Nervous? No, not at all, just—”</p><p>“It’s been a long shift, Shang. Me and my partner here wouldn’t mind a little distraction. Do one of your bender tricks for us?”</p><p>“I told you, I’m not—”</p><p>“Not a bender?” The first of the guards stepped shoulder-to-shoulder with his partner, barring the merchant from any escape. “Not according to what we’ve heard. No need to be nervous, we’re just a little curious, is all.”</p><p>“I think I’ve seen enough.” Katara, who had been at Aang’s side, strode forward.</p><p>He agreed. “We got your back, hon.”</p><p>“What’s going on here?” she asked as she reached the altercation.</p><p>As he turned, the first man’s hand tensed around his sword’s pommel. He had small, accusatory eyes that peered from beneath the brim of his plumed helmet. “Ma’am, this is police business. Please step away.”</p><p>“Police business?” Aang muttered to himself.</p><p>“You’re harassing this gentleman because you think he’s a bender.” Katara was clearly working to keep her anger in check. “Why?”</p><p>Sokka approached Aang from behind. “Let’s get up there.”</p><p>“No,” Aang barred him with his staff. “We will, but we need to see how they react first, when they still think it’s two-on-one. That ought to tell us something. Katara can handle them.”</p><p>“I’m a bender!” she shouted. “You gonna arrest me, too?”</p><p>The square fell silent. The two officers shared a wary glance.</p><p>One of them seized Katara’s shoulder.</p><p>Aang sometimes forgot how fast Toph could be. She stepped in first and pushed the officer. Hard. His cuirass buckled under the impact, crumpling to uselessness.</p><p>“Watch your fucking hands!” She stood over him, fury in her sightless eyes.</p><p>His partner attempted to draw his sword. Katara drew a fist of water from the fountain and cast it at the hilt, freezing the man’s hand to the grip and the blade to the throat of the scabbard. He retaliated with a straight blow aimed for the juncture of her arm and shoulder, middle and index fingers extended—a qi-blocker. She deflected the strike and if Aang had blinked he would have missed her slamming him into the churned flagstones with a determinate <em>thud</em>.</p><p>Three more surged into the square down a short flight of steps, swords drawn. Sokka ran to greet them, sword in one hand and an axe in the other. He caught a thrust beneath the beard of his axe, wrenched down and tore the weapon from the officer’s hand, kicked him away and parried the next, then a follow-through, threw his hips to the side to avoid a thrust and swung down, chopping the blade clean in two with his own sword.</p><p>“A little help, please?!”</p><p>Aang was on him before he had even finished speaking. He leapt, gathering a ball of water from the fountain on the uptake, and sent it at the guards in torrents. As he landed, a swath of air sliced from the end of his staff and blasted the remaining officer away, all of them rolling into the dirt wall that curved up to the façade of a building, their armour clattering.</p><p>The gang closed ranks. “How long have we been here?” Sokka asked, weapons dancing in his hands. “Five minutes? Might be a new record for us.”</p><p>“You okay, Katara?” Aang asked.</p><p>“Yeah, I’m good. You?”</p><p>“Good. Toph?”</p><p>“Feel even better once I’ve cracked some skulls.”</p><p>Officers swarmed the square, sending the onlookers running to their homes. Before long, all around Aang and the others was a writhing mass of drab green and red armour and glittering swords. Loose flagstones shivered with the vibrations of their teeming footfalls.</p><p>A man whose armour was adorned with gold trim and whose helmet plume was a deep, earthy green instead of a provocative red, stepped forth from their ranks. Evidently, he was the ranking officer. “Surrender your weapons and come quietly!”</p><p>“Was that what you had in mind?” Sokka asked.</p><p>Toph wore a grin Aang recognized as the kind that meant she was in a punching mood. “It’ll do.”</p><p>“Stay together,” Aang whispered, then broke formation, easing out of his stance to stand at full height and address the crowd. “There’s been a misunderstanding!”</p><p>“They attacked us!” said the man that Toph had flattened, his voice strained.</p><p>“Who said your name?!” she barked.</p><p>“Quiet, Toph, please!” Aang turned to the attacking horde again. “These men here, your officers, were harassing the owner of that stall for being a bender. We stepped in to defend him.”</p><p>“You are under arrest for the use of bending in assaulting a police officer,” the captain ignored him outright. “Lay down your weapons and surrender yourselves.”</p><p>Aang placed his hands on his chest. “I’m the Avatar, and these are my friends. We’re here in Cranefish by request of Councilman Gato.”</p><p>While the captain’s brow was still a taut furrow over his scrutinizing eyes, the ring of blades he commanded eased and wavered for a moment, and that was the opening Aang had been looking for.</p><p>“And this,” he gestured to Toph, “is Toph Beifong—”</p><p>“The greatest earthbender the world has ever seen!”</p><p>“—daughter of Councilman Lao Beifong.”</p><p>“That too!”</p><p>Aang moved to help the two officers Katara and Toph had floored, hoisting them to their feet with careful pillars of wind. The look he gave them was not one of apology.</p><p>“If you don’t believe me that we’re here by council request,” he said, turning back to the captain and retrieving the scroll from the folds of his robes, “then read this.”</p><p>Aang sent it to him on a disc of air. The captain, his expression still one carved of stone, unfurled the letter and cast his deep brown, almost black eyes on its contents. His men waited anxiously.</p><p>He rolled the scroll and jammed it into his belt. “Follow me.”</p><p>With that, Aang turned to his friends, arms held out as wide as his smile. “Easy-peasy.”</p><p>“You always were a smooth talker,” Katara laughed, and caressed his face as she passed by to follow the captain.</p><p>“No he wasn’t,” Sokka scoffed, but clapped his shoulder. “Good job, buddy.”</p><p>A coach drawn by a pair of ostrich-horses rattled down the street some minutes later, once they were clear of the square. Aang tried to start a conversation with the captain, but realizing gruff grunts and askance looks were all he was going to get in response, quickly ditched the effort in favour of quiet symbiosis. The coach clattered to a stop and Aang offered Katara a hand, holding the door open for her; the captain tried to do the same for Toph—more out of a sense of duty towards her parentage than any chivalric inclination—who pointedly rejected the offered hand, hoisting herself into the coach.</p><p>The ride gradually smoothed as they reached the wealthier districts of the city, and again Aang was reminded of Ba Sing Se, and of Sokka’s adage about progress. Lady Tienhai had told him to have faith in people, to trust that they would progress in a way that would not jeopardize the natural world—that progress and preservation could co-exist—and his trust had been rewarded with this. Utopias built on the backs of dystopias. He did not like it one bit.</p><p>Even more troubling was his inability to fully extricate himself from this place. Years ago, when General Old Iron threatened what was then little more than a huddle of buildings and a refinery, Aang and the others had saved it; again, not long after, Liling’s uprising was crushed, once more saving the town from destruction and bloodshed. Thanks to Aang and his friends, it was no longer an enterprising town but a blustering city, yet all the change he had wrought did nothing to ingratiate him to it. Despite the services he had done for it, he could never quite shake his contempt for the place. Despite that contempt, he could never seem to stay away from it. Destiny, he mused, was dancing its capricious fingers on the thread of his life.</p><p>“You’ve got that look again.”</p><p>Katara’s voice stirred him from his thoughts. He smiled when he did not expect himself to, for what better way to be lifted from such a sour reverie than the softness of her voice. “What look?”</p><p>“The one you always get when you think about Cranefish.” She lay her hand on his and interlaced their fingers.</p><p>He shrugged. “Just sorta drifted off. Sorry.”</p><p>“You don’t have to apologize. I know it’s hard, all this being built on Air Nomad land.”</p><p>He gave no other answer than a nod.</p><p>She kissed his hand. “Are you okay?”</p><p>“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” The inevitable smile when he met her eyes broadened across his face, and he pressed her hand to his heart. “I know so.”</p><p>The coach eased to a stop outside of the council hall, and the gang piled out. Unlike the rest of the city, the council hall was exactly as Aang remembered it—looming and imperial. Its high stone walls and double eaves, tiled with ceramic painted an ostentatious gold, lent it an air of autocracy.</p><p>“Welcoming place,” Katara monotoned.</p><p>“You’ll like it a little more once you hear all the riveting political discussion,” Sokka said, then mimed shoving a finger down his own throat. Toph laughed.</p><p>“Hey, nice moves back there, by the way, meathead,” she hit his shoulder.</p><p>Sokka put his fists to his hips. “Well, thank you, Toph! Feels good to be appreciated.”</p><p>“Yeah, don’t get used to it.”</p><p>True to Sokka’s mockery of the council, when the doors swung open, the first sound to greet them was one of an argument. Every person in the hall seemed to be embroiled in the conflict, their voices swirling into an indecipherable bickering aggregate, and the building’s acoustics did little to help. That was another change—the hall itself had been expanded to accommodate more members of the council, all of which sat at long tables that stretched from the entrance to the dais at the head of the great room. Benders and non-benders were no longer seated at opposite tables, as had been the case when Aang and Sokka last set foot in the council hall. They all sat together.</p><p>Except, at both tables, all the benders were at the ends nearest to the door and furthest from the dais.</p><p>Cranefish City got better by the minute, Aang thought.</p><p>“Councillors, please!” the man at the lectern said, his gesticulations the only thing that made him be heard over the roar. Aang recognized him as Lao Beifong. “A noble guest comes to our hall! The Avatar and his friends!”</p><p>“Hi, dad,” Toph waved.</p><p>“Yes, hello, Toph. Avatar Aang, thank goodness you’re here. We find ourselves at a crossroads.”</p><p>“You bet we do,” Katara crossed her arms, though what she really meant flew over Lao’s head.</p><p>“Indeed, young lady. Avatar, would you be so kind as to explain to the Council—”</p><p>“I’m not explaining anything until you give your daughter a proper hello, Councillor,” Aang chided.</p><p>“Aang,” Toph said in a voice that could not have come from her. “Don’t.”</p><p>Aang turned.</p><p>She crossed her arms, hard. “Forget it. He doesn’t need to.”</p><p>If looks could kill, the ones that fell upon Lao at that moment would have turned him to ash. With a collective sigh, the gang moved to the center of the chamber, and one councillor leapt from his seat as though that had been a heinous affront.</p><p>“Is there a problem, sir?” Aang asked.</p><p>“Is there a problem,” he scoffed. He was a beanpole of a man with a pockmarked face that was contorted in a perpetual snarl. A greasy sheen marred his hair. “The Avatar himself arrives in our town and no later do he and his band of misfits start a row with the police.”</p><p>“Speak of me however you want, Councillor,” Aang began, “but don’t insult my friends.”</p><p>“Very well, Avatar Aang. I will be as frank with you as I should like. Your misdemeanor not an hour ago exemplifies the exact problem that has plagued Cranefish City for far too long—public bending needs to be be outlawed.”</p><p>“Outrageous!” a bender from the end of the chamber shouted and was promptly ignored.</p><p>“Your officers were harassing a man who they thought was a bender on accusation alone,” Aang retorted, “if you can call it an ‘accusation.’ Bending is an inseparable part of our identity. Not just as people, but as a world. Outlawing it is unacceptable.”</p><p>“Is that why you spared Fire Lord Ozai’s life?” the councilman said. “I’m certain this council needs no reminder of Ozai’s tyranny, but it seems the Avatar could use one.”</p><p>“Excuse me?” Katara snapped.</p><p>“Sparing Ozai’s life was an act of weakness, treason, and favouritism!”</p><p>Toph crossed to the table and slammed her palms on its surface. “We’ll see who’s weak when I fold your fucking head!”</p><p>“How dare you!” Katara mirrored Toph. “Do you have any idea what we went through—what Aang went through—so people like you could live peaceful lives?!”</p><p>Now Sokka joined the discussion. “Of course he doesn’t. All this guy cares about is expensive silk robes and his dumbass haircut. Seriously, did you fish that thing out of the harbour?”</p><p>“Look at them, my fellow councillors,” the man said, acting very brave for someone within Toph range, “threatening violence at the first sign of opposition, as is the benders’ wont. Just like Liling and her supremacists. Benders simply believe themselves above everyone else, as they always have. The Avatar is no exception.”</p><p>Lao was beginning to sweat. “Councillor Manyu, calm yourself!”</p><p>“Need I remind you, Lao, that you proposed an identical regulation five years ago?”</p><p>Toph turned her fury to her father, then. “You did what?!”</p><p>Aang stabbed the stone floor with his staff, silencing the hall with a deafening boom. “Enough!”</p><p>His voice, his command, was omnipresent. Even the ornery Manyu fell silent. Katara, Sokka and Toph turned to him at once.</p><p>“My friends and I,” he began with strained patience, “were invited here by Councilman Gato. Can someone—without screaming—please point us in his direction?”</p><p>“No need, Avatar.”</p><p>The voice, deep and urbane, sounded from the entrance. A man stood there whose hair, as black as his unblemished tang jacket, reached just below his breastbone. Despite a dour demeanor, he wore a quick smile, and bowed his head as Aang met his eyes.</p><p>“It is a pleasure,” he said as he approached, “to finally make your acquaintance, Avatar Aang, and that of your esteemed comrades, as well. I’ve heard much about you, as I’m sure everyone in this room can say.”</p><p>“The pleasure’s all mine,” Aang brightened for finally having a level head in the room. “I take it you’re Councilman Gato.”</p><p>“Correct.” He turned his head to address the council and his affable expression vanished. “I asked the Avatar here.”</p><p>An uproar blared through the hall again, and Gato waited patiently for it to fall quiet, as his presence demanded. Impressive, Aang thought.</p><p>“Scorn me as you wish,” he said, his voice a commanding rumble, “but if we have any chance of resolving the issues that afflict this city, then we must be willing to set our differences aside and stand together, not apart, with our bender neighbours. Your attacks on their persons are nothing short of despicable. While I am ready and willing to set forth on the road to change, I can see many of you are not, and so I sent word to the Avatar, the Bridge, so that with prudence and forethought he may aid us. Tensions are clearly high, so if level heads are to prevail, I suggest we adjourn this meeting and reconvene tomorrow. Agreed?”</p><p>Murmurs of indecision rumbled forth.</p><p>Gato finished for them. “Excellent. The council is adjourned.” He turned his attention back to Aang, his levitous demeanor returning as he did so. “Please, Avatar Aang, if you and your friends would be so kind as to join me. I’ve a stagecoach outside for us.”</p><p>They all allowed themselves a glare at Councillor Manyu, turning up his nose at them, before they made for the door.</p><p>“Can you believe that guy?” Sokka asked.</p><p>“This close,” Katara said, “this close, Aang.”</p><p>“I have a feeling Councilman Gato will be able to help us with him,” he said, then panned his eyes around the room. “Where’s Toph?”</p><p>“Already going,” she said, determinate strides launching her past them and towards the exit.</p><p>Lao caught up to her and grabbed her arm. “Toph, please, I—”</p><p>Aang thought she would hit him then and there. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever touch me.”</p><p>“I was only doing what I thought was right!”</p><p>“You tried to outlaw bending! Bending! You didn’t think of me at all, did you?”</p><p>He said nothing.</p><p>“Well?!”</p><p>“Toph…”</p><p>“You know, on second thought? I bet I was at the forefront of your mind when you tried to do that. Wasn’t I? I bet you were thinking how bending had ruined the perfect little defenseless porcelain girl you wanted me to be, and you were about to get your sweet revenge. And you know what?” She laughed humourlessly. “You want to know the funniest thing? I actually thought you changed after mom left you. I actually believed you when you told me you were sorry. That you gave a shit.”</p><p>“Toph, please.”</p><p>“Keep my name out of your mouth,” she jabbed a finger into his chest. “I am Toph Beifong, the greatest earthbender in the world, inventor of metalbending, and you should count yourself lucky to share my name. It’s mine. Not yours, mine.”</p><p>She made for the door. “If I ever see you again, I’ll put you in a hole so far in the ground you won’t be able to tell the dirt from the back of your eyelids. Then you’ll be as helpless as you wish I had been.”</p><p>Toph left the building.</p><p>Lao Beifong, broken and slouched in defeat, received no sympathy, for he deserved none. Sokka’s eyes lingered on his the longest.</p><p>As they filed out of the building and crossed the street to Gato’s coach, Sokka lay a hand on Toph’s shoulder, giving it a companionable shake. “Don’t pay any mind to that guy, Toph.”</p><p>She shrugged his hand away. “Easy for you to say when you have a dad that actually gives a rat’s ass about you.”</p><p>His mouth fell open as he scoured his mind for the right thing to say, testing how the words might sound. “You’re right. You’re right, I’m sorry, I just—”</p><p>“Just leave me alone right now, Sokka. Please. I need to be alone.”</p><p>“Sure. Sure, whatever you need.”</p><p>Aang and Katara shared a look between themselves. One that at once asked what they should do, and if they should do anything at all. Inaction felt like a betrayal of their friendship to Toph, but as painful as it was to see her this way, it was what she needed the most from them.</p><p>“I’m sure it’s been a long day for you all,” Gato said sincerely, and gestured to the coach. “I’ve arranged a place for you to stay. Please.”</p><p>The ride was long and quiet. Toph rested her chin in the palm of her hand, and from the expression on her face, her mind could have been as serene as a waveless sea or buffeting with enough rage to crack the world open. Sokka sat next to her, across from Aang, Katara, and Gato, stealing careful, worried glances, as they all did.</p><p>“I’m sure you’re wondering how such a schism arose in Cranefish,” Gato said, breaking the pregnant silence. “Between benders and non-benders.”</p><p>“In retaliation for Liling’s uprising, I’ll bet,” Katara said. “It wasn’t so long ago that benders were on the other side of the fence on this whole thing, and non-benders are scared it will happen again. To them—the ones in power, at least—it’s a reason to subjugate.”</p><p>“Precisely, Katara. You saw for yourself the position benders hold in the Business Council. It has been slowly and methodically whittled down over the years as the non-benders used, and continue to use, anti-bender sentiment to consolidate power.”</p><p>“Didn’t it occur to anyone,” Aang said, “even once, that letting a bunch of profit-driven, power-hungry businessmen be the ones to establish and uphold policy was a bad idea? No offense, Councillor.”</p><p>“None taken,” he laughed. “Rest assured, I agree. I seldom see eye-to-eye with my fellow councillors. The road to change is a narrow and winding one, but someone must walk it.”</p><p>The coach rumbled to a stop some minutes later outside a modest dwelling. It was not a garish and gaudy estate, but a pleasantly simple home on a solitary street overlooking one of the city’s neither extravagantly rich nor squalidly poor districts, and Aang thought well of Gato for that, or at least better than the others on the council. Had it been any other councillor that had invited them here, they would have arrived to silk cushions and filigreed rugs, and while Aang was not one to complain about such hospitality, a lone, modest house on a quiet street made him think that perhaps this Gato was, in fact, the right man for the job. One who did not fritter away his fortune on the material.</p><p>“You will have access to whatever resources I can spare,” Gato said as they piled out of the coach. “And you may stay as long as you need.”</p><p>“Thank you, Councilman Gato,” Katara said, and she and Aang bowed. Sokka did, too, seeing his friends. Toph remained stoic. “We’ll do everything we can to repay your generosity.”</p><p>“I don’t doubt it. I must be off.” He shut the door of the coach. “Good night, everyone.”</p><p>The driver flicked the reins, the ostrich-horses squawked, and the gang saw Gato off as his coach rumbled down the street.</p><p>“Y’know, with that guy’s help,” Sokka said, “I think we can really make a difference in this town.”</p><p>Aang clapped his shoulder. “I think so, too. Come on, let’s get inside.”</p><p>Toph had beaten them to it. As they entered the house, a door slammed shut. She had found a room, laid claim, and shut herself inside.</p><p>Katara frowned. “I hope she’s okay.”</p><p>“She will be,” Aang said. “Toph’s as tough as they come. She just needs time.”</p><p>“Tough or not, it never hurts to have someone to talk to. Why don’t we make some dinner and see how she’s doing then?”</p><p>Sokka nodded. “I’ll talk to her. Just, don’t let Aang do all the meal prep—we’re going to be staying here a while, and no way I’m eating nothing but veggies for weeks on-end.”</p><p> </p><p>As Sokka rapped his knuckles on the door to Toph’s room, he could not for the life of him find a reason as to why his mouth felt so dry. “Toph? Mind if I come in?”</p><p>No answer. He creaked the door open to see if she was asleep.</p><p>She lay on the bed, one of the room’s only furnishings and certainly its biggest, facing the lone window in the far wall, legs curled almost to her chest.</p><p>“I didn’t say come in,” she said.</p><p>“You didn’t say not to, either.” Sokka entered, a plate loaded with food in his hand. “Aang and Katara made dinner. It’s… actually, I don’t really know what it is.”</p><p>“I’m not hungry.”</p><p>“They called it a salad? Beats me. Apparently it’s healthy.”</p><p>“Shut up.” He had managed to get a laugh out of her, and there there was no greater victory than that. “You’re such a dweeb.”</p><p>“Does that rank higher or lower than meathead?”</p><p>She laughed again, but the smile on her face, visible from behind by the way her cheeks swelled, vanished quickly. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”</p><p>Sokka sat on her bed with a sigh, placing the plate on a side table and leaning against the headboard. “Don’t be. I can’t imagine what that’s like. Your own dad—”</p><p>“He’s not my dad. He’s not my family. You guys are the only family I need.”</p><p>“You’re right. You know we got your back no matter what. But our parents are supposed to support us, be there for us, and it’s okay to be sad if they aren’t.”</p><p>Toph sat up, leaning against the headboard as Sokka did. She shook her head. Shook it again as her eyes shimmered with rare tears. “He’s such a bastard. I hate him. I hate him. Does that make me a terrible person?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“I mean, who even am I? Am I everything that I am out of spite? Because it was exactly who he didn’t want me to be? In a way, didn’t he still dictate the kind of person I am?”</p><p>“I don’t believe that, and I don’t think you do either, really. You’re the baddest badass in the Four Nations because you chose to be. It was a calling, something that spoke to you and you rose to it. You know yourself better than anyone I’ve ever met, and a lot of people don’t have that confidence. And you know what, Toph? I wouldn’t ask you to be anything different. None of us would. You’re great at being you.”</p><p>He relaxed his arm for the slugging he knew to expect, but it did not come. He waited longer, until, without warning, she draped her arms over his shoulders, around his neck, pulled him tight. After the hesitation of surprise, he embraced her back.</p><p>“Thanks, Sokka.”</p><p>“Any time.”</p><p>They stayed there in that embrace in companionable silence for a long time. A long time. When they pulled away, only just far enough away to look into each other’s eyes, Sokka thought how rarely he saw hers from so close, and surprised himself with the thought that he would like to fix that. Tentatively, she raised a hand to his jaw, her palm callused and dry and rough as driftwood. Her breath was hot on his face. He cupped her hand in his and was thankful that she could not see him falter and glance down at her lips.</p><p>They parted.</p><p>“Right,” Toph cleared her throat, “well, thanks. I’m not sad anymore so get out.”</p><p>“Yep, got it, already going.”</p><p>He closed the door behind him far harder than he meant to and, thumping his back against it, exhaled a breath he did not know he had been holding. “What was that?”</p><p>“Sokka?”</p><p>He nearly leapt out of his skin. Aang stood at the end of the hall, peering from around the corner where the corridor opened into the living room,</p><p>“Hey, hi, Aang!” Sokka shouldered off the door. “Hello!”</p><p>“Is, uh, everything okay?”</p><p>“Yep! Yep, yeah, everything’s perfect! Fantastic, even!”</p><p>“Toph is feeling better?”</p><p>“Um, Toph’s feeling a lot of things, I think?” Sokka’s voice cracked for the first time since he was a teenager. “I mean, who isn’t, y’know? We’re complicated beings, us humans. But definitely better. Better is one of them, one of the things that she is. Feeling.”</p><p>“That’s… good.”</p><p>“Sure is. Anyway, I think I’m gonna go for a walk.”</p><p>“But it’s dark out—”</p><p>“Got a real hankerin’ for a walk, Aang! It’s not healthy to ignore these kinds of urges, you know!”</p><p>He could not have left the house faster if he had sprinted through the wall.</p><p>What was he doing? Toph? Toph Beifong? His mind raced half as fast as his heart as he paced the quiet moonlit streets, the wind distant and whistling through the gaps in the corrugated metal roofs and walls of the lower districts. Toph's friendship was too dear to him to risk endangering. It had been nothing more than a product of the moment, he convinced himself. Simple as that. Nothing more. At any rate, the thought of a relationship like that seldom did anything else but put a pit in his stomach.</p><p>Ever since Suki.</p><p>Kyoshi Island seemed a forbidden land. A concession unnecessarily, maybe even foolishly self-imposed, but one he had sworn to never transgress. Perhaps that was part of the problem.</p><p>It was years ago, now. Completely mutual, and part of Sokka wished that had not been the case. It left the impression that there was still a way to salvage it. There probably was, and that was what haunted him the most. There had been tension, certainly, but the dissolution of their relationship had not been one of eruptive arguments and heat-of-the-moment castigations, but one of enough love and respect for the other person not to waste their time anymore.</p><p>“Waste” was not the word for it, though. To say that it was would be to make an injustice of what they had. Even if it did culminate in something he had long ago resigned to the idea that he would never get over; around the same time that he decided to take to the road instead of staying home in the South Pole. “Soul searching,” he had called it, but perhaps that was not entirely true. Again he was reminded of Toph, and he ruminated on how she might have handled it. Stood stalwart and steadfast, instead of running away.</p><p>“I still love her, Yue,” he said as he turned to the moon, full and burning in the sky. “And Toph deserves better than that.”</p><p>On nights like this, when the moon filled to the silver edges of itself, he could swear that a voice other than his inhabited his mind, so vague and distant and transient and at once unassailably there.</p><p>
  <em>You still love me, too, don't you?</em>
</p><p>It was not an accusation. It was a lesson.</p><p>And just as he returned to the house, strides invigorated with renewed purpose, he noticed them approaching the windows.</p><p> </p><p>“Sokka was acting really weird, earlier.”</p><p>Katara laughed as she unhooked her mother’s necklace and laid it on the bedside table with the exaggerated care she always took when handling it, swipes of moonlight refracting from its turquoise medallion. “What else is new?”</p><p>“No, I mean, not the Sokka kind of weird. It was right as he was leaving Toph’s room, I think.”</p><p>“Really?” She pursed her lips. “I hope everything is okay. Maybe she yelled at him.”</p><p>“Believe me, we’d have heard if that was the case.”</p><p>Resolving that the answer would make itself apparent by morning, the two of them settled into bed with a synchronous shrug. They lay facing one another, Katara’s hands pillowed beneath her head. A laugh spilled past her upturned lips. Aang smiled back, as much because the sound of her laugh as it was because of the realization that his heart still fluttered when he heard it.</p><p>“What’s so funny?” he asked.</p><p>“Your ears.”</p><p>“What about my ears?”</p><p>“You grew into them.”</p><p>“Grew into them?!”</p><p>“They were huge when you were a kid!”</p><p>“It’s an old airbender thing. Vestigial. They used to fly with them.”</p><p>“Shut up!” she slapped his chest as she pressed her forehead against it, curling with laughter. “Such a stupid joke.”</p><p>He wrapped his arms around her and she settled easily into his embrace, her head tucked beneath his chin and his arm settling into the familiar dip at her waist. The scant scent of cinnamon filled his lungs.</p><p>“What do you make of all this?” he asked.</p><p>“Some serious change has to happen around here.” The warmth of her breath hushed across his bare chest. “The people in the lower districts are beaten and miserable, the police abuse people with impunity, and the only ones with the power to change anything are the ones with power in the first place. They’ve made sure of that.”</p><p>“Not the only ones. We’re here.”</p><p>“We are,” he felt her nod against him. “And we have to turn the power over to the people, but how? March into every factory in Cranefish and tear it to the ground?”</p><p>“We’ll figure something out.”</p><p>“We always do.” She tilted her head to kiss him, then settled back. “Let’s get some sleep.”</p><p>Aang’s grip around her began to snake away. He grew serious. “We can’t.”</p><p>Katara surely felt the tension in his body. “What? What’s wrong?”</p><p>“Someone’s coming.”</p><p>They were out of bed and on their feet in a second and no sooner did shards of glass burst into the room. Aang thought he heard Sokka’s voice from outside just before. The window blew in and Aang felt tiny stings across his body, on the forearm that he brought up to shield his face, across his ribs and abdomen, his right leg. Shards of glass.</p><p>“Katara!” He did not know if she had been hit.</p><p>A foot slammed into his ribs where the shards had impacted. Pain spread through his chest and down his side and the force of the kick dashed him over the bed and onto the floor.</p><p>“Aang! Aang, are you okay?!”</p><p>Whorls of smoke filled the room by the time he was back on his feet. Sounds of a fight were his only indication of where Katara was. Something shattered. Then a loud thud, like a person hitting the floor.</p><p>Aang pulsed his arms outward, palms flat, and flushed the smoke to the walls. Katara had a man clad in black beneath her heel. Two more swung in through the windows and there was a crash downstairs. The door had been broken down.</p><p>“Get the girl!” the man on the floor strained, and plumes of fire leapt from the palms of his hands, the flames crawling up the walls and engulfing the bed. “She’s a waterbender!”</p><p>The room burst into orange light. Aang somersaulted over the bed, now nothing but raging flames and charred cloth, and a surge of wind from his feet sent one of the assailants flying back through the second story window. The other speared into Katara and tackled her through their bedroom door.</p><p>“Katara!”</p><p>They had landed just short of the stairs. Katara kicked the man off and over her head, sending him crashing down the flight, his tumbling descent knocking balusters out of the railing. The walls downstairs flickered with orange light and smoke licked at the ceiling.</p><p>“I’m okay!” Katara said. “They’re burning the place down!”</p><p>The man who had moments before been flat on the ground with her heel in his chest was now on his feet and blasting fire at them. Aang ducked over Katara, recoiled back and slammed the heel of his palm into the man’s jaw, augmenting the blow with a gust of wind. He hit the ceiling, then the floor. The entire room was ablaze.</p><p>“We have to get Toph,” Aang shouted over the roar of the flames as he helped Katara to her feet, ignoring the screaming pain all down his right side. “I think Sokka’s outside!”</p><p>Behind him, the attacker he had smashed against the ceiling staggered to his feet and limped out of the window.</p><p>“Leave him!” Katara pulled Aang down to the ground floor. The stairs collapsed right at their heels and the ceiling was peeling away from itself, roiling plates of flame surging over every surface.</p><p>Aang’s stomach flipped. “Katara, your necklace!”</p><p>She had only realized it then herself. Her eyes widened to saucers.</p><p>“I’ll get it!”</p><p>“Aang, don’t!”</p><p>The staircase was a cauldron of flame. He bounded over it, landing weightlessly on the half-collapsed landing at the top, and charged into the room. Smoke stung his eyes and seeped into the tiny bleeding wounds in his side and everything ached and burned. He slapped his hand over the necklace, still on the side table, snatched his glider staff from the floor, and then the room fell out from under him.</p><p>He propellered his staff overhead a moment too late and landed with too much weight on his right leg, shredded by glass. It buckled beneath him. The oblique slabs of rock jutting out of the floorboards told him that he had landed in Toph’s room. She must have fought off attackers of her own.</p><p>“Toph?” He heaved and coughed and spat. “Toph!”</p><p>Nothing. He took a long, ragged breath and expelled the smoke from his lungs, a great gust that knocked out the room’s lone window and flushed the smoke through it. He could breathe and see again. The door was open. He launched through it.</p><p>Katara stood in the centre of the living room, tails of water circling her and jetting into the raging flames. “They’re torching the place from outside!” she called. “We need to go, Aang!”</p><p>Then the whole house shifted.</p><p>Aang stole a glance through a nearby window and saw that the ground outside was slowly rising. They were sinking into the earth.</p><p>“Earthbenders!”</p><p>A straggler entered from the living room’s far end, behind Katara. His arms windmilled and a gout of fire was about to shoot from his hands when a block of earth burst out of the floor, splintering and curling the floorboards and launching him into the ceiling and he plummeted straight back down, jaw-first on the rock. Toph charged into the room and hammered her foot between his shoulder blades. Inaudible over the deafening creaks and sighs of the collapsing building, his neck snapped silently but surely, his head tilting back at a sickening angle.</p><p>Toph assumed a horse stance and held her arms out and up, shouldering a weight. The rumbling in the floor stopped.</p><p>“I’ll hold us, Katara!” she gagged on smoke. “You two get out!”</p><p>“Where’s Sokka?!”</p><p>“I think he’s outside! I’m right behind you! Go!”</p><p>Katara broke into a sprint and Aang gathered her at the door. With a stomp, he bent the wall of dirt beyond the door into a staircase, and he and Katara made their escape.</p><p>They heard a shout as they reached the street, a warcry. Sokka shoved an assailant’s sword away, ducked a backswing and sawed his blade’s fine edge through the man’s stomach, dropping him to his knees and lopping his head from his shoulders with a vicious downward swing. The corpse fell aside one other.</p><p>Spotting his friends, Sokka clumsily sheathed his sword to gather the two of them in his arms. “Guys! Are you okay?!”</p><p>“You’re covered in blood!” Katara said.</p><p>“It’s not mine! I don’t think.” His eyes widened yet more, somehow. “Where’s Toph?!”</p><p>Aang entered horse stance. “Inside!” His arms and chest tightened and tensed, muscles straining as he held up the house. “Toph, I’ve got it! Get out of there!”</p><p>The house was little more than split timbers and flames, now. A sinkhole had swallowed the entire building. It was more than half below the ground, the earth consuming it in an act of avarice.</p><p>Katara took Aang’s side and was putting the flames out as best she could. “Toph, come on!”</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>Sokka ran in.</p><p>“Sokka, no!”</p><p>“We have to hold it for them, Katara!”</p><p>Slowly, implacably, the house sunk further into the bowels of the earth. Aang risked a look up the escarpment behind the house. A figure stood at its edge. The earthbender. Katara gathered water from the air, pulled it from nothing into a great hemisphere that she suspended over the crippled building, waiting. Waiting.</p><p>Waiting, until Aang sensed movement at the lip of the sinkhole. Staggered, arrhythmic footsteps.</p><p>Sokka and Toph, carrying one another and coughing their throats bloody, but alive, crested the sinkhole.</p><p>“Now!”</p><p>Katara dropped the half-dome of water on the building and doused all the flames at once. The force of the downpour brought what little was left of the thing in on itself. Dust and ash shot upwards, gusting against the bowled walls of the sinkhole and launching into the air. Aang felt the resistance lapse. The earthbender that had been forcing it down finally stopped and, as Aang spotted, disappeared from the edge of the escarpment.</p><p>He relented and almost collapsed, vision blurring and pain white-hot. His entire right side was aflame, pockmarked with tiny lacerations where glass shrapnel had impaled him.</p><p>But he did not have time to feel pain. Sokka and Toph were doubled over in the middle of the street, retching and gagging on the smoke in their lungs.</p><p>“They can’t breathe,” Katara said, her voice shaking. She tried to give them water but they coughed it up before they could swallow it.</p><p>Aang knelt by his friends. Breathe in, breathe out. It had to be steady. He shut his eyes, focused, and slowly lifted his hands. For a moment they were false dragons, coiling tails of smoke curling out of their mouths and nostrils. He pulled the air out of their lungs.</p><p>The smoke dissipated in the sky and the two of them took their first unhindered breath in minutes, greedy and deep and desperate.</p><p>“Toph,” Sokka croaked, and wobbled to his knees. “Toph, talk.”</p><p>“Idiot,” she said, her voice just as haggard. “Fucking idiot, you almost died!”</p><p>It was the most aggressive hug Aang had ever seen. Who pulled whom into the embrace was unclear. Sokka could have yanked her from the ground, or Toph could have pulled him down to it, but they met in the middle and whispered something to each other he did not hear.</p><p>Katara fell over them. “You’re okay,” she said with poignant relief.</p><p>“I’m okay, Katara.”</p><p>“Ain’t dead yet, queenie.”</p><p>Aang shuffled forward on his knees and into the embrace. The attackers had escaped, and frankly, in that moment, Aang was glad of that. Death had cast its withering gaze across them, and only now did its vulturous eyes flit elsewhere.</p><p>But not quite.</p><p>“Shit, Aang.”</p><p>It had been Sokka that spoke. They all pulled away from one another.</p><p>Katara’s voice hitched. “Aang.”</p><p>He looked down to see that he was covered in his own blood. Streams of it reticulated across the right side of his body, soaked through his pant leg, stained half of him in a sanguine curtain.</p><p>He blinked hard, head suddenly spinning. “Feel a little… woozy.” He fell on his backside.</p><p>“Aang!” Katara rushed to his side. “Just stay awake. Don’t worry, this is nothing. I’ll have you patched up in no time.”</p><p>“What’s going on?” Toph asked. “What’s wrong with Aang?”</p><p>“He’s covered in blood,” Sokka answered. His voice was reluctant, as if to speak the answer would be to speak Aang’s death into being.</p><p>“It’s glass,” Aang said. “From when the attackers blew the window in.”</p><p>“Shit. Shit.” Katara’s hands went to her hair. “How are we going to get it out?”</p><p>No one gave an answer. There was none to give.</p><p>Then her eyes caught the full moon. “I have an idea you’re not going to like.”</p><p>Aang did not know what she meant, at first. Realization struck him all at once. “Absolutely not.”</p><p>“What other way is there?”</p><p>“There has to be one.” He tried to stand, even knowing he could not, to prove through stubbornness alone that there was a recourse they had just yet to see. The protests of his body sent him back to the ground.</p><p>“Aang, sit still.”</p><p>“I’m fine.” He tried again and failed again to stand.</p><p>She put her hands on his shoulders. “Let me do this. Please.”</p><p>“No, Katara!”</p><p>Toph spoke up. “Someone wanna fill us in?”</p><p>“She wants to bloodbend it out of me!”</p><p>Silence.</p><p>Aang shook his head, and the dizziness that followed made him immediately regret it. “I can’t ask you to do this for me, Katara. You hate it, I know how much you hate it, you can’t—”</p><p>“Aang!” She cupped his face in her hands. “Do you trust me?”</p><p>His tone was deadly serious. “Completely.”</p><p>“Then let me do this. It’s my choice.”</p><p>One final attempt to persuade her otherwise impelled him to open his mouth, but no words came. They died in his throat. He relented, and leaned back.</p><p>Moonlight shimmered in the unshed tears in her eyes. She blinked hard. “Give me a knife.”</p><p>Sokka drew one from his boot and handed it to her wordlessly. The blade sliced through the soaked cloth of Aang’s pants and she peeled the right leg away, revealing half a dozen more cuts. She choked down a gasp, and started raising her quaking hands. They shook uncontrollably. Then snapped steady.</p><p>Tendrils of blood crept out of the wounds in Aang’s side. Branching out of him to hang in the air, crawling slowly, bolts of grim and languid lightning. Glittering dust speckled the blood, the larger shards catching the moonlight in white stripes. Aang’s arm, caked with nets of blood, went stiff, twitching unnaturally. When the pain forced him to suck air in through his clenched teeth, he tried to do it as quietly as possible. It felt like his own blood was alive—he could actually feel it moving.</p><p>“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Sokka said. Toph swiftly reprimanded him with a punch.</p><p>“Are you okay?” Katara whispered to Aang.</p><p>“Yeah. You?”</p><p>She bit back a sob. “Terrified.”</p><p>It was slow and it was painful, and worse than all of it was watching her. Pain he did not fear. Pain, he could endure. What he could not endure was seeing Katara like this.</p><p>“I’ve almost got it all,” she said.</p><p>Finally, as soon as blood that no longer glittered began to coax out of him, the tendrils dropped out of the air all at once and splattered the dirt in ragged lines. Aang and Katara both exhaled a trapped breath, and she placed a hand under his head. Sokka and Toph rushed to their side.</p><p>With water sleeving her hand, she coursed it across his arm, his chest, his leg. The wounds sealed as her hand passed over them, and the blood washed from his skin. He grunted in pain as the wounds closed, but the worst was over.</p><p>Katara finished tending the wounds. Her hand was warm on his cheek. “Aang?”</p><p>He responded in kind, bringing a hand to her face, tears tracking through the smoke and soot that stained her cheeks.</p><p>“It wasn’t because I didn’t trust you, Katara,” he stammered. “You know I do. More than anyone. It wasn’t the pain I was scared of, I just couldn’t—”</p><p>“I know.” She kissed his forehead, hard, relief and shock and fear all at once, and brought his head to her chest. “I know.”</p><p>The four of them embraced. Knelt there in silent comfort, none of them speaking what all of them were surely thinking—Councilman Gato needed to be paid a visit.</p><p>But that would come later. For now, they lay there, sobbing and thankful for each other’s lives and their own.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The gang confronts Councilman Gato about the assassins; Toph and Sokka have a difficult conversation; the gang finds gainful information on Lao Beifong and his involvement with the Business Council's sinister machinations.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“If I may recap,” Sokka began, dragging a hand over his face before counting on his fingers with tired exaggerations, “we haven’t been in Cranefish for more than six hours and we’ve already gotten into a fight with the police…”</p><p>“Influenced municipal policy,” Katara continued.</p><p>“And almost been set on fire and buried alive,” Aang concluded.</p><p>“All in all?” Sokka said. “Not actually the most eventful six hours we’ve had in our lives.”</p><p>Their feet hung over the edge of the pit in the earth that had been their residence up until roughly half an hour ago. Toph was behind them, silent except for grunts of exertion as she beat cracks into the wall of the escarpment with flurries of punches, palm-heels, chops and elbows, barely distinguishable from one another for how fast they were. Absent of anything else to do to pass the time, she had taken to an earthbending exercise. Aang had never seen this one before, but it did his heart good to see her making some use of the martial art she had picked up from him over the years—that of the Air Nomads—tempered with a bit of her own. In his periphery, he noticed Sokka staring, too.</p><p>Eluded by what the next course of action would be, but determined to devise one anyway, Aang leaned back on the ash-dusted grass and pillowed his hands beneath his head, wondering in one of his rare moments of wry cynicism if perhaps the stars overhead would bestow him with a nugget of cosmic wisdom. That was before he remembered that the blanket of pollution Cranefish City heaved into the air obscured most of them from vision. He found himself looking up at a sightless sky.</p><p>Walking into the meeting tomorrow would be foolish, because it had to have been a Business Council member that sent the assassins after them; even if going to the police did not seem a moot and distasteful recourse to begin with, Sokka, in listing the reasons why the last six hours had decidedly sucked, made it clear that it was not an option; Gato never told them where he lived, so it was impossible to question him. Their plan, much like the sky overhead, was oppressively blank.</p><p>Aang sat up, hissing through his teeth at the pain and favouring his right side. Katara jolted to action at the sound, moving to try and help him the rest of the way. “Take it easy, dummy,” she said, her voice soft and thankful.</p><p>Aang’s eyebrows hiked as he remembered the ribbon in the folds of his robes. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He made to reach with his right arm, but it protested him with a painful burn, so he curled his left hand into the cloth sashed across his chest and retrieved Katara’s necklace. “I managed to save it before I… y’know, fell through the floor.”</p><p>He dropped it into her cupped hands. For a moment’s silence, she stared at it with solemn reverence.</p><p>She pressed her lips to his, a thumb stroking his cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered as they parted.</p><p>“Don’t.” He was surprised by the harshness in his voice.</p><p>As was Katara. “What’s wrong?”</p><p>“If I had been more careful,” he spoke more at himself than to Katara, “moved just a little bit faster, you wouldn’t have had to—”</p><p>“Aang.” She held up the necklace. “Why did you run through a burning building to get this?”</p><p>Of course, he knew her point immediately. Testament to the wisdom beyond her years that he had long adored about her. She was right, as she always was. “Because I love you.”</p><p>“You know better than anyone what it’s like to have to do something you’re scared to do. Even terrified.” Trembling imperceptibly, her fingers brushed the phantom wounds on his arm.  “It wasn’t the bending I was scared of, Aang.”</p><p><em>I was scared of hurting you.</em> That unspoken truth made the space around his heart shrink.</p><p>“But I did it,” she said, “because I won’t accept doing anything less if it means you won’t be okay.”</p><p>They settled into one another, and if the pain in his side began to soar, Aang would have ignored it. In all the shared experience of his uncountable lives, all the millennia through which he had persisted, there did not exist enough wisdom from which to draw the words to articulate all that Katara meant to him. She was profound.</p><p>“Neither will I,” he whispered.</p><p>If the world would have allowed it, he would have stayed there, Katara warm against his side and that faint, enamouring cinnamon smell swirling in his chest. The world, however, was not all he had to contend with, for if that was to be his contribution to the pool of possible next steps, the sentimentality would have earned him a cuff about the ears. From Toph, who had not said a word and was still punching the escarpment wall, earthbending in keen concentration, as well as from Sokka, who was still watching her.</p><p>So it was lucky, then, that as if on cue, a stagecoach came rumbling towards them from down the street.</p><p>Aang, Katara and Sokka stood warily. Aang gripped his staff a little tighter and the impacts from Toph’s strikes paused for a moment, perhaps in consideration, then returned a little louder.</p><p>Fifty paces away, it drifted to a stop, ostrich-horses screech-whinnying and Gato, still dressed in his nightwear, leaping from its cab. A trio of men followed. An armed escort, one that lagged behind as Gato ran in a mad panic towards the sinkhole.</p><p>“I came as soon as I could!” he called out, stumbling as he noticed with a start the bodies in the street. Those of the men that Sokka had engaged while the rest of the gang was still inside. He closed the rest of the distance, hands resting on his knees and eyes so wide they rivaled the moon rearing overhead. “What happened?!”</p><p>In his periphery, Aang saw Sokka’s hand settle on the sword at his waist, and Katara’s on the waterskin on her side. She primed her thumb under the stopper.</p><p>Aang narrowed his eyes, knuckles whitening around his staff. “We were hoping to ask you the same question.”</p><p>Just as they were about to, a dull thud sounded from behind them. They turned.</p><p>Her stillness was eerie. Toph had put a fist half an inch into the wall of rock. Pearl-sized chunks sloughed over the back of her hand and littered the ground at her feet. Dust sanded her forearms. A thin plate of rock fell from the wall and shattered like ceramic as it hit the earth.</p><p>Jade eyes flared with holy rage, panning slowly over her shoulder. Shoulders that rose high and fell hard. She looked at nothing in particular. Nobody made a sound.</p><p>When she pulled her hand away, there was a red stain in the centre of the hole she had left.</p><p>Both hands oozed blood.</p><p>She had not been earthbending at all.</p><p>“Toph,” Katara said, breathlessly.</p><p>With a crescendoing warcry she turned fully and charged.</p><p>Her shoulder crushed the air from Gato’s lungs. The flaps of his nightgown winged outwards as she lifted him off his feet then slammed him into the dirt, his collar clutched in one fist and a bludgeon of stone now hovering over the other.</p><p>It came arcing down, and had Aang been even a moment too late in smashing it aside, Gato’s head would have been pulp. “Toph, stop!”</p><p>The guards lumbered towards them, encumbered by their armour but finally closing the distance with swords in their hands. Sokka wrapped his arms around Toph and pulled her clear of Gato. A stray elbow nearly unhinged his jaw.</p><p>“You’re a fucking dead man!” she shouted, feet searching for purchase on solid ground as Sokka lifted her away. “You’re a dead man, Gato! I’ll kill you!”</p><p>“Toph,” Sokka grunted, craning his head away, “calm down!”</p><p>“You fucking calm down!”</p><p>Katara hauled Gato to his feet. She was not gentle. “Did you send the assassins?”</p><p>Gato’s jaw wagged in wordlessness. Aang moved to the guards and they stopped, heeding an unspoken warning.</p><p>“Did you send the assassins?!” Katara repeated.</p><p>“Assassins?!” Gato stammered, casting fretful glances at the pair of bodies in the street. “No, of course not! Is that who those men are?”</p><p>She turned. “Toph?”</p><p>Sokka set her down. Or rather, she shoved herself from his grip, and squared her feet. “Say it again.”</p><p>Gato did not respond at first, not knowing that the command was directed at him. The ensuing glares were ample clarification. “No! I sent no one, I swear! It must have been someone else from the Council!”</p><p>“Who else would have known we would be here?”</p><p>“I don’t know, Katara. I hosted most of the other councillors here before, at one point or another, it could be—”</p><p>“Names, Gato,” she barked. “Who else? How did they know we were here, at this house?”</p><p>Toph quelled the interrogation. “He’s telling the truth, Katara.”</p><p>Had their faith in Toph been anything less than unflagging, the whole standoff could have come to blows. Katara released Gato after a warning glare. Aang felt the anticipation in his legs slacken, once again all too aware of the pain radiating down his side, but he made no mark of it. Gato’s guards uncoiled, one with an audible sigh of relief.</p><p>“Sorry, Councillor,” Sokka said, his sword sliding back into its scabbard. “Gotta understand where we’re comin’ from, here.”</p><p>“Rest assured, I do.” He smoothed out the wrinkles in his night gown as he returned to his full height. “I’m so sorry this happened, though I’m glad you’re all well.”</p><p>“Barely,” Toph growled. “Meathead and I just about choked to death.”</p><p>Sokka fretted after her hands. “Toph, we need to get those seen to.”</p><p>“In a minute.”</p><p>“Now,” Katara said, in a tone that even Toph saw no point in resisting, and carefully led her away. Sokka seemed to tarry, caught in a liminal space for a moment, before resolving to stay with Aang and Gato to discuss what was next.</p><p>“Katara’s right, Councillor,” Aang said, leaning just a little more of his weight on his staff. “We need names. Do some digging, try and find out who else might have known we would be here, and how.”</p><p>“Of course,” Gato spoke with the courtesy of a man that had not just been manhandled and nearly savaged by two of the deadliest benders in the world. “I’ll find out as much as I can. In the meantime, you four should find a new place to stay. I’m afraid you’re on your own on that front—likely, the less I know, the better.”</p><p>“In case you let something slip?” Sokka voiced a suspicion that Aang was happy to see shared.</p><p>“Merely an extra precaution,” Gato raised his hands. “Cranefish is crawling with Council spies, each of them working for different members. They’re so gripped by paranoia, I wager there’s scarcely a time when I’m not being listened to. Indeed, it’s likely how they knew you would be here. As I said, the less I know, the safer for you it will be. When you need me, find me at my home on the western end of town.” His grin was a touch cynical, a touch prideful. “The only house without a gold ceramic roof.”</p><p>“Understand, Councillor,” Aang said. He looked to Katara and Toph, crouched at the edge of the sinkhole. Katara’s hands glided over Toph’s, whose face betrayed no pain, for there were strangers present and she had a reputation to uphold. “We’ll do some digging on our own. And I think I know just the place to start.”</p><p> </p><p>Morning had come, and so had the man they had been waiting for.</p><p>The doors to the warehouse grinded open, and in the still silence of dawn it was loud enough to stir the entire city from its restless slumber. A man entered, whistling and genial despite the early hour, bidding the security guards farewell as he relieved them of the graveyard shift. Keys chimed as he swung a ring of them around his finger.</p><p>“Do we just walk out in front of him?” Sokka whispered</p><p>“We don’t want to spook him,” Katara said.</p><p>“How can’t we? We’re not exactly supposed to be in here—one way or another, we’re gonna freak him out.”</p><p>“Ugh.” Toph stood and strolled forth from their hiding spot behind a barrier of metal crates. “Let’s just get this over with.”</p><p>“Toph, wait—”</p><p>“Satoru!”</p><p>He just about left his own skin. The ring of keys sailed into the air, landing on the cement floor in a clanging heap and Satoru followed suit, stumbling with a yelp.</p><p>“Toph?!” His glasses had hopped down the bridge of his nose when he fell. He straightened them. “You nearly gave me a heart attack! What are you doing in here?”</p><p>“You know what I like most about Toph?” Sokka whispered as they left their hiding spot. “Her subtlety.”</p><p>Though such a feat seemed impossible, Satoru’s eyes widened more at the sight of them. “How did you all get in?”</p><p>“Come on,” Toph said, hauling him to his feet, “look who you’re talkin’ to.”</p><p>Aang, ever the diplomat, flicked the keyring from the floor with his staff and handed it to him as he rested a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry about the intrusion. But we had to talk to you, alone. It’s important.”</p><p>Doubtfulness marked his face, but he nodded. “Sure. Come on, we can talk in my office. And, uh,” his eyes came back to rest on Toph, “it’s… good to see you, Toph.”</p><p>She gave a non-committal nod in response. Aang, Katara and Sokka shared wary glances amongst themselves as Satoru led them through the warehouse and upstairs to his office. They passed through an administrative wing, which had not been more than a huddle of cubicles on their last visit. An entire section of Earthen Fire Refinery had been dedicated to it, now.</p><p>Aang did not try to delude himself into thinking that the refinery’s success had been achieved on ethical grounds. Even if Cranefish City’s presence on sacred land did not sour him on it enough already, they had seen for themselves the way things flourished under Business Council rule—unremittingly, and with little regard for anything but its own progress. As Satoru explained the expansion with chest puffed out in pride, unaware that nobody but Katara was really listening, Aang noticed a firmness in Toph’s walk. Every footfall was deliberate, exceedingly certain, and he had known her long enough to know that it meant she had no desire to be here. Her thoughts on coming to Earthen Fire had been clear enough already—this was merely a subtle substantiation. Sokka appeared to notice it, too.</p><p>“Hey,” he bumped her arm. “You okay?”</p><p>“Fine.”</p><p>“How about your hands? They feeling better?”</p><p>“Fine.”</p><p>“Let me know if you need anything—”</p><p>“Until then,” she gritted, “stop bothering me.”</p><p>Sokka opened his mouth, perhaps to apologize, but none came. He nodded, to himself, and Aang tried to reassure him with as comforting a look as he could muster.</p><p>They entered the manager’s office—Satoru’s, who had evidently been awarded for his diligence with a promotion—and seated themselves.</p><p>“Now,” Satoru sat straight as a rail behind his desk, “what is it you guys wanted to talk about? I’ll help in any way I can.”</p><p>“We need information on Lao Beifong,” Toph said.</p><p>Satoru paled instantly. “…Your father?”</p><p>“I didn’t say my father. I said Lao Beifong.”</p><p>“I…” His brow furrowed in sudden frustration. “I can’t help you. Please leave.”</p><p>“We aren’t going anywhere without leads,” her voice rose. “We nearly died last night.”</p><p>“We don’t know that it was Lao,” Katara cut in before Toph could really start shouting, “but that’s what we’re trying to find out. Someone on the Business Council doesn’t want us here. They sent assassins after us.”</p><p>“Assassins?” Satoru cried. “Are you okay?!”</p><p>Katara blinked. “Yes, Satoru, we’re fine. But we need to know who it was, and finding out if Lao knows the answer, or doesn’t, will help us.”</p><p>“We’re sorry to put you in this position,” Aang said. “We know he’s your boss. But like Katara said, someone doesn’t want us in Cranefish City, and we need to know exactly why.”</p><p>Satoru shook his head so slightly it might have been mistaken for trembling. He was pale as a sheet. “It’s not just because he’s my boss. Please. Please don’t make me do this. Leave.”</p><p>“Satoru…”</p><p>“I want to help you.” He spoke so quietly that the paranoia became contagious. “I do. But me, my employees… They’ll kill us all, if they have to. If they even so much as feel like it.”</p><p>If any thoughts had been stirring about simply breaking into Lao’s office anyway, that stopped them cold.</p><p>“We’re prisoners,” he continued, “hostages. Lao will know it was me. They all will. Please.”</p><p>“If you don’t help us, you’ll never stop being hostages.” Toph made no effort to mask her disgust at her father’s iniquity, and her tone was almost callously pragmatic, but also comforting, calm. “We can change things around here, but we need your help first. It starts with you, Satoru.”</p><p>His eyes glassed with tears. Paralysis gripped him. Silence fell over the room. “I’m sorry, Toph. I can’t.”</p><p>For a moment, it looked like she was going to turn the request into a command, but she simply nodded.</p><p>“We understand,” Aang said as he and the others stood to take their leave. “Sorry to have put you through this. We’ll find a way to make things better for you here. We promise.”</p><p>If Satoru was convinced of that promise, he did not make it apparent. They began to file out of the room.</p><p>“Of course,” his voice stopped them—sudden and tremulous, but tempered by something. A dash of blind hope, maybe, “hypothetically speaking, if a person were to, without my knowledge, enter the refinery at night through a gate that happened to be inexplicably left unlocked…”</p><p>All four of them shared the same sly grin. “Maybe the one by the river,” Katara said.</p><p>“Maybe the one by the river.” Satoru dragged an arm across his eyes. “Now, gaining entrance to Boss Man Lao’s office would be something they’d need to figure out on their own once they got inside. He’s the only one with a key.”</p><p>Toph unsleeved the siderite bracelet from her arm and bent it into the approximate shape of a key. “If only this hypothetical someone could metalbend. Too bad, huh?”</p><p>“Too bad.” A small smile crossed Satoru’s face. “They’d have to contend with security, but the place would be mostly empty.”</p><p>Aang nodded. “This means a lot. Thank you.”</p><p>Toph cleared her throat as they began to file out of the room. “It was… It was good seeing you. Y’know, figuratively speaking.”</p><p>Another small, tired smile as he exhaled a laugh. “You too, Toph. Be careful.”</p><p>The gang put Earthen Fire Refinery behind them, for now. Under normal circumstances, having gotten what they came for might have done something to lift their spirits. Under normal circumstances. But in a city like Cranefish, hunted as they were, complacency invited peril. Exhausting as it was, paranoia would need to be a close ally.</p><p>That meant, then, that it was back to living like they were on the road. They found a small promontory on the coast, far enough away from the city—Aang hoped—to serve as suitable digs, and followed the beach as it wrapped around the headland until Cranefish proper was fully obscured from sight. As he and Toph earthbent a cave into its side and furnished it with a fire, he was reminded of Sokka’s optimism for a daring adventure, and how Aang himself had been foolish enough at the time to doubt it. Nobody could argue that they did not lead eventful lives, at least.</p><p>It was hard, sometimes, to reminisce about the old days; they’d had each other, but that was about the only thing that kept any of them from blacking out at the thought of all the pressure they had been under. Nevertheless, there was a kind of comforting familiarity to living out of a cave. Aang might have wondered what that said about him if he did not love the company so much.</p><p>“I’m hungry,” Sokka said, and sprawled out on the cave’s cold floor. “Find us food.”</p><p>Comforting familiarity, indeed.</p><p> </p><p>“Y’know,” Sokka said, flicking a pebble at the wall of the cave that now only he and Toph occupied, “maybe we shouldn’t have sent the guy with the arrow tattooed on his forehead to go incognito and get us food.”</p><p>“It was your idea.”</p><p>“Well, yeah. They always are.”</p><p>Toph snorted and did not realize at first that she was pacing. The far more startling realization was that for the first time in—ever, she felt uncomfortable being in silence with Sokka.</p><p>She left the cave wordlessly. Even though Sokka said nothing, probably assuming she was just off for a walk about the beach—which was the excuse she would have given anyway—she regretted parting without saying anything. Not enough to stop her, but she regretted it.</p><p>Her seismic sight blurred has she stepped onto the beach outside, and she gyred her feet until she hit the sediment below. Vision returned, partially, and the sand was hot around her ankles.</p><p>Was this what she was like? Not the sand, the grainy, indiscernible mosaic of half-sight it imparted, but the irrational and stubborn and impenetrable compulsion that impelled her to blind herself instead of just enjoying the silence? Or better yet, actually talking things out?</p><p><em>Confront everything head-on except yourself</em>, she thought with a humourless laugh. <em>Coward.</em></p><p>Seeing Satoru again had been largely painless, and that had been something she met full-facing. Perhaps that should have been a model to follow. To her mind, it would be a simple conversation; an admission of blame, an apology, and back to their normal symbiosis.</p><p>But it was there that the difficulty lay. She did not want their normal symbiosis. And in that, her guilt was compounded.</p><p>She would talk to him about it. But later.</p><p>For now, there was something else she wanted to overcome, and so she rolled her pant legs to her knees and stepped into the shallows.</p><p>Black smeared across black as she stepped onto the wet sand. Nothing distinct except for the indistinction of it. The tide rolled in, smelling of salt and copper, and she sucked in a gasp as the water lapped at her ankles, sweeping away even the vague smears of visible sightlessness until it receded. She stepped forward, trying to find some sense of ballast she could cling to in the mounting vulnerability. The water was at her shins, now, just below the rolled cuffs of her pant legs, deep enough that there was no more intermittent pseudo-sight between the push and pull of the tide. Just blindness absolute.</p><p>Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.</p><p>“Toph?”</p><p>Any courage she had managed to muster vanished. She froze.</p><p>“Help.” First it was a whisper. She forced the words out of her throat. “Help.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“I said come help me, Sokka!”</p><p>Even knowing that the approaching sloshes were his footsteps, listening to them draw closer and closer and faster in the void sent her heart rocketing into her ears. She shot a hand in the direction of the sound, grasping desperately at nothing until he was in range.</p><p>A hand seized hers, and another her shoulder. “Gotcha.”</p><p>Sokka. It was Sokka’s voice. She knew that already.</p><p>“I can’t see,” she hated the voice that spoke those words, “take me out of the water, I can’t see.”</p><p>“Alright, no worries, just—”</p><p>“Don’t let go of me!”</p><p>“I’m not gonna!” There was a tinge of humour in his voice that she would have hit him for if she wasn’t petrified. “I’m gonna lead you towards the beach, okay? Just walk with me.”</p><p>She nodded and did not exhale until they hit sand again.</p><p>“What were you doing?” Sokka asked.</p><p>His tone was curious, she reminded herself, not accusatory. “I was…” She paused to probe her mind for a word that was not <em>scared</em> or <em>fear </em>until she remembered who she was talking to long enough to get over herself, and dropped onto a block of sandstone she bent from the earth. “I was trying to teach myself to stop being scared of the water. Which was going fine until you came along, by the way.”</p><p>Sokka scoffed. “Sure it was. Look, if you want to get over your fear of water, why didn’t you just say so? I’d be happy to help!”</p><p>“Because I—” Toph checked herself, and suppressed a flinch at the eagerness she failed to disguise. “Will you?”</p><p>She was vaguely aware that he had stepped away. From the soft textile thumps that came shortly after, she determined that it was to shed his clothes, an innocently familiar prospect that she tensed at anyway. A callused hand gripped her own and urged her from her seat.</p><p>“You, uh,” Sokka coughed, “might need to—”</p><p>Toph stripped down to the cloth band and briefs beneath her shirt and pants.</p><p>“—Yep, okay, yeah, you got it.”</p><p>They waded back into the water, stopping once it was just above Toph’s waist and just below Sokka’s. It began with floating. Just floating, and Toph was content that it not advance any further beyond that. Whether that was due to trepidation or the warm hand pressed to the small of her back was a question she refused to answer. “Do you mind if we just do this for a while?” she asked.</p><p>“Not at all. Whatever you wanna do.” A few moments passed. “How was seeing Satoru again?”</p><p>Toph tilted her head so one ear was above the surface. “Hm?”</p><p>“I was just asking how it was seeing Satoru again.”</p><p>“Oh.” She shrugged involuntarily, intaking a panicked breath for a moment for fear that the slightest errant twitch would send her on an uncontrollable tumble through the water, before settling herself again. “Wasn’t bad. He seems to be doing okay except for the Business Council breathing down his neck, so that’s good.”</p><p>Sokka nodded, she assumed. “You guys ended on good terms, right?”</p><p>“Eh. I probably could have been nicer about it. Satoru’s a nice guy, he’s just sort of… invertebrate, y’know?”</p><p>“Mm.”</p><p>“Any time there was conflict, he’d just knuckle under. Didn’t matter what it was. It was kinda the main reason things didn’t last long with me and him. He never wanted to face anything head-on. Even if… even if it was really important.”</p><p>The conversation was not about Satoru, anymore.</p><p>“Toph?”</p><p>“I need to talk to you about something.”</p><p>“Sure.”</p><p>Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.</p><p>“I’m sorry about last night,” she made a conscious effort not to rush it all out. “When you came into my room to talk to me about the fight I had with my dad.”</p><p>“What’s there to be sorry about?”</p><p>“I got too… forward. I got too forward, Sokka, and I didn’t ask if it was okay. Because of Suki.”</p><p>Sokka had been slowly drifting her through the water until then. His hand stayed on her back, but she felt the movement stop.</p><p>“And then I was rude to you in the refinery this morning,” she did not want the apology to lose momentum, “because I thought that would be enough to make you forget about it, instead of just apologizing. Can I stand?”</p><p>They moved into shallower water and he helped her to her feet. She tried not to think of the absence of his hand on her back as an absence.</p><p>“I was protecting myself and disrespecting your feelings.” She shook her head, swallowed. “Stupid. You deserve better than that. I’m really sorry.”</p><p>“No,” Sokka cleared his throat, “no, it’s—it’s cool. Don’t worry.” The tide seethed quietly against the beach. “It was on good terms. Really good.”</p><p>Toph sensed the desire to keep talking in his voice and hoped that her eyes found his. “I’m glad.”</p><p>“Between my responsibilities back home with the tribe and hers with Zuko and the Kyoshi Warriors, there was just never enough time. It put a bit of a strain on our relationship, sure, but we both… We both got it, y’know? And we both loved each other enough to want something for one another that was better than what we could give.” Sokka cleared his throat again to level his voice, and was silent for long enough that he could have absconded back to the cave, for all Toph would have known. Until his fingertips brushed her hand. “Toph, there’s something I need to—”</p><p>Toph launched clear out of the water, crawled over his back and had her arms wrapped around one of his shoulders and a leg slung over the other before he could even voice his surprise.</p><p>“Toph!” She felt him fighting to recover his balance. “What’re you—”</p><p>“Something touched my leg,” she hissed.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Something touched my leg!”</p><p>“It’s alright, it was probably just a fish.”</p><p>“It was gross and weird, is what it was!”</p><p>Sokka’s laughter was almost enough to make her forget about it. “I’ll take us back—hey!”</p><p>She felt the tension in his body. “What?”</p><p>“Sorry, it just touched my leg, too. It’s cool, it’s just a—”</p><p>For all the bucking and flinching, Toph still could not find it in her to conjure fear at being unable to see. Sokka’s juvenile shrieking helped. “What’s happening?”</p><p>“It keeps touching me!”</p><p>“Why is this fish so fucking aggro, dude?!”</p><p>“Ew, it’s slimy!”</p><p>“Well, stop standing around! Yip-yip, dipshit!”</p><p>Each flailing, floundering footstep towards the beach reminded Toph of her hatred for nautical travel. Though, if she had to choose between clinging to the sheer strake of a boat and clinging to Sokka, allowing herself a moment of lasciviousness, she supposed it would be an easy choice to make.</p><p>The pair of them crashed onto the beach, Toph unlatching from his shoulders once the slogging of water faded from hearing. She thudded onto the hot sand and raked her fingers through it, taking a greedy breath of relief at being able to see again, even if it was hazy and inhibited.</p><p>“Yip-yip?” Sokka fought to catch his breath. “Did you just tell me to yip-yip?”</p><p>A grin so wide it threatened to bisect her entire head adorned her face. Toph made no effort to fight it. When Aang and Katara found them, they were both still in hysterics.</p><p> </p><p>“How are we looking, guys?”</p><p>Aang and Toph snaked their hands up over the edge of the riverbank and pressed their palms to the cool earth. Distant tremors of footfalls pulsed through their limbs. The grinding of a warehouse door. A closing gate. Stillness.</p><p>Enough, at least, to tell them that the only people that remained in the refinery were the security guards they had been warned about.</p><p>“Coast is clear,” Toph said. “Let’s break and enter.”</p><p>“Let’s just enter,” Aang warned.</p><p>“Buzzkill.”</p><p>The four of them crept out of the defilade of the riverbank, Sokka mumbling about a soggy boot, and ghosted towards the gate Satoru had assigned as their point of ingress. As per his promise, it was unlocked, and although Aang had faith in Satoru, he could not but breathe a sigh of relief—bending their way in would have been a noisy affair.</p><p>They would have to get into the administrative wing again. Lao’s office lay in wait on the top floor, and carpeted between it and them was a team of tired, complacent security guards. For someone who had broken into and out of the Boiling Rock when he was only sixteen, as Sokka had been keen to remind them, this was child’s play.</p><p>“Sokka, Zuko told us about it,” Katara whispered as they crossed the courtyard leading to the warehouses. “You were flying by the seat of your pants the whole time.”</p><p>“And doing so with peerless grace and elegance, thank you,” he said moments before catching his foot on the wheel of a cart, tripping, knocking the wheel off the axle, and spilling the entirety of the cart’s supply of unrefined crystal onto the ground.</p><p>Scrambling, they ducked into the shadow cast by the warehouse as security guards rushed to the scene. Above them, a chute hung out of the wall—one used to transfer the miner’s bounties into carts like the one Sokka had just kicked to death, and the very same one they had used to enter the refinery in the morning. The four of them linked hands, and Aang hauled them into its darkened metal maw with an uptake of wind.</p><p>They braced their hands and feet against the chute’s walls. It smelled earthy and metallic. “Everyone good?” Aang asked.</p><p>“Good as in okay, or good as in doesn’t do something to give away our position every eight seconds?” Katara hissed.</p><p>“Look, we didn’t get caught, did we?” Sokka said. “What can I say? To err is to be human.”</p><p>“Then you must be real in-tune with your humanity, meathead,” Toph said.</p><p>Outside, Aang heard the faint voices of the security guards that had come to inspect the cart, complaining of a rickety wheel and relegating the responsibility of clean-up to the people that had failed to adhere to instructions not to overburden the carts. Good. They had aroused no suspicions, yet.</p><p>With exaggerated slowness, they advanced up the chute, shuffling in the confinement to buttress themselves between the chute’s walls with their backs against one side and their feet against the other. Aang thanked that the chute’s oversight in security did not parallel a flaw in construction, for if it had been made any less soundly, the kinking metal and reverberant thumps would have announced them with all the subtlety of a marching band.</p><p>“Alright,” Aang whispered after a few minutes of silence, “we’re at the hatch. How’s everybody doing?”</p><p>There was a hint of mischief in Katara’s voice. “Can’t complain about the view.”</p><p>He was glad the chute was dark enough not to betray the redness that rushed to his face.</p><p>“Hey,” Toph said, “I know it’s hard for you degenerates to keep your libido in check, but how about we save this for later when we aren’t stuck with you in a metal fucking box?”</p><p>“Please,” Sokka said with a pointed weariness. “And thank you.”</p><p>Aang coughed and changed the subject. “No one’s outside. Let’s go.”</p><p>He popped the hatch and clambered out of the metal throat of the mineral chute onto a tramway elevated over the factory floor. One by one, they crawled out of the chute and melted into the shadows, padding towards the stairwell that snaked upwards into the administrative section of the refinery. “I know the way from here,” Toph said as she took point from Aang, “stay behind me.”</p><p>“Alright,” Sokka grinned as he walked alongside their line, “let’s get some dirt on the bad guys.”</p><p>The stairwell door swung open.</p><p>Toph clapped a hand to Sokka’s mouth and shoved him against the wall.</p><p>A guard strolled out, tapping his fingers on the pommel of his sword. There was a bounce in his step, for he had an easy shift with no disturbances.</p><p>The door drifted closed, and Aang, Katara, Sokka and Toph, huddled into one another and tucked in the corner behind it, were so still and quiet that Aang wondered how the guard had not heard the heart hammering out of his chest. Katara’s pounded up his forearm, as he had slung his arm across her chest when they sank into the wall.</p><p>“I said,” Toph gritted, “stay behind me. Dumbass.”</p><p>Sokka nodded against the palm of her hand.</p><p>They passed through the door and into the stairwell, and at its peak it opened into a wide corridor completely at odds with the rest of the refinery. Where the factory had concrete floors, the corridor had burgundy rugs; where there had once been I-beams crossing overhead, there was now a bamboo ceiling to mask the unsightliness. Bonsai trees sat on polished mahogany tables that lined the walls at regular intervals all the way to its end. The entrance to Appraisals—a cavernous, astringent white room where crystals were scrutinized for impurities—stood to their left, and the contrast between that room and the corridor was so diametric that to stand in its threshold would be to have one foot in the Fire Nation and the other in the South Pole. Any trace reminder of the factory had been covered up, and at the end of all the filigree stood the double doors to Lao Beifong’s office.</p><p>There had not been so much as a latch on the door last time they were here. Now it was tantamount to a bank vault, and Aang thought that augured well, for it meant that Lao had something worth hiding. Aang and Katara stacked up on one side of the entrance, Sokka on the other, while Toph took the siderite bracelet from her arm and drew it into a filament, which she fed slowly, steadily into the lock. Every few seconds the metal would whine, there would be a faint click, and she would slide it imperceptibly further into the lock, moulding it to suit the intricate tumblers she could sense on the inside.</p><p>She had made it clear on their approach to the refinery; simply bending the latches out of the grooves would mangle the lock. The next time Lao went to open the door, he would know it had been tampered with. Blame, or at least suspicion would fall on Satoru, and he had made it clear that such an outcome would end severely. No, she had to bend a key of her own.</p><p>Such a task was time-consuming. And as Aang sensed the incoming steps of a pair of guards, time ceased to be on their side. “Toph, we’ve got incoming.”</p><p>“This is a delicate operation, Aang, you’re gonna need to give me a minute.”</p><p>One was passing through Appraisals, the other hauling up the stairwell.</p><p>“You don’t have a minute, you have maybe seven seconds at best.”</p><p>“You can do this, Toph,” Katara said.</p><p>“Of course I can. Master earthbender, metalbender, and now—” a salvation <em>click</em>, “burglar.” She palmed the door open. “Inside, knuckleheads.”</p><p>Just as they eased it shut behind them, Aang sensed the guards entering the hallway. “Nice work, Toph.”</p><p>“Was there ever any doubt?”</p><p>Lao’s office was even more garish than the hallway that led to it. It had always been a little exorbitant, but it was hardly accurate to call it an office anymore. More a den of luxury. If he was so concerned with trying to forget his proximity to the common rabble that he was vastly underpaying, he might as well have bought a palace. The décor he had chosen certainly suggested that he could afford one.</p><p>Someone plucked Aang’s elbow. He turned to find Sokka, hands on his hips and an ostentatious military helmet on his head. Behind him was an empty bust, and next to it, another bust with a helmet much the same. “How do I look?”</p><p>Aang put on the other helmet. “Like I outrank you.”</p><p>“Insubordination. I’ll have you flogged.”</p><p>Katara barked their names. “Aang! Sokka!”</p><p>Aang all but threw the helmet off his head and back onto the bust. It landed crooked and sent the bust teetering. He barely caught it in time. Sokka’s followed the same clumsy progression.</p><p>“Do you two mind?!”</p><p>“Sorry,” Aang straightened the helmet. “Sorry.” He straightened it again.</p><p>They accepted the reprimanding glare, but Aang could not help but suppress a laugh. He crossed over to Lao’s desk and began picking through the drawers, and it was not long before he found something of use. A letter, attached to a rolled-up scroll.</p><p>“‘Councilman Beifong,’” he began reading the letter aloud, and everyone gathered, “‘our compatriots are growing uneasy. Recent events have necessitated that we expedite our efforts. You know to do your part; we will handle the rest.’”</p><p>“I wonder if ‘recent events’ means us,” Katara said.</p><p>“Maybe. He must have gotten this letter pretty recently, if that’s the case. We haven’t been here long. Look, there’s no signature. Just this sigil.” Aang pointed to the bottom of the page. “A spider with a sundial on its back. Wonder what that means.” He unfurled the scroll, and at its top read the words <em>Civic Protection Act</em>. “It’s the draft of a bill. Whoever sent this to Lao must want him to table it to the Council.”</p><p>“What’s the bill about?” Sokka asked.</p><p>Aang’s eyes widened as he read on. “They’re tripling the funding for the police. Higher grade weapons and armour, mechanized vehicles, escalated qi-block training—it’ll be an army by the time they’re finished.”</p><p>“He always kept a planner,” Toph said. “We find that, we might know when he plans to table the idea, if he hasn’t already.”</p><p>“Already on it,” Katara was flipping through a leather-bound journal. “Oh no—he’s going to introduce the bill tomorrow.”</p><p>“Tomorrow?” Aang said. “Then we know for sure that we’re the reason the Council is scrambling. First they try and outlaw bending, then they try and take us out of the picture, now they’re tripling down on militarizing the police. They’re gearing up for something. And whoever this is,” Aang flipped back to the letter and pointed to the spider sigil, “is orchestrating the whole thing. The entire Council must be in on it.”</p><p>“And I’ll bet it’s spider-guy’s money that paid for the fancy new digs,” Toph said, gesturing generally about the room. “Seriously, I can feel the tackiness.”</p><p>“So, what, we find Lao’s bank records?” Katara slapped the journal closed and replaced it on the desk.</p><p>“That’s exactly what we do, queenie. We find his bank records, we find out who that spider sigil belongs to. We find them, we hit this whole operation in the pockets.”</p><p>“Good work, guys,” Aang took exaggerated care to place the letter and scroll in the same spot he had found it. “Let’s get all this to Gato and see what he has for us.”</p><p> </p><p>Councilman Gato’s home was a nice change of scenery from the gaudiness of Lao’s office, and a pleasant reminder of the residence he had offered them before it got reduced to splinters by a cabal of assassins. They sat in his living room, drinking terrible tea and saying nothing of it. Iroh had spoiled them.</p><p>“What you say is deeply troubling,” Gato said as he re-entered the room from the kitchen, cupping a mug of tea for himself in his hands. “The Council’s corruption is blatant, there is no denying that. But this all seems much more sinister than their typical devices. Much more.”</p><p>“We were thinking the same thing, Councillor,” Aang said, and was not sure if he was stifling a laugh or a reproof as he caught Toph pouring her tea into a potted plant. “We still don’t know who sent the assassins after us, but it’s clear that the Council is preparing for something they don’t want us interfering with.”</p><p>“Speaking of which,” Katara said as she sipped her tea, masking the vile taste with practiced diplomatic ease. It was sweet, and Aang smiled at her for it. “Were you able to come up with anything?”</p><p>Gato brought a fist to his mouth to suppress a hiccup, and managed to make even that gesture seem refined. “Not as much as I would like, I’m afraid. My seniority in the Council carries a modicum of respect, but outside of that, I’m not exactly popular. My fellow councillors become rather tight-lipped when I enter the room.” He blew on his tea, took a sip, and seemed to genuinely enjoy it. “I know this much, however; there is a meeting happening at Councilman Manyu’s estate tomorrow evening. I assume it has to do with the Civic Protection Act you have uncovered.”</p><p>“Then that’s our next lead,” Katara said. “For Aang and I, at least. Toph and Sokka are off to Ba Sing Se.”</p><p>Gato cocked an eyebrow.</p><p>“I assume the silence implies a question,” Toph said, and Gato cast an abashed glance into his tea. “Lao’s always done his banking through the Ba Gua Credit Union. He’s got friends there that cut him deals on interest rates, stuff like that. Meathead and I are gonna go to the bank, take a peek at his records, and see if we can’t find out who’s pulling his strings.”</p><p>Gato hummed contemplatively as he took another sip of tea.</p><p>“Don’t worry, Councillor,” Sokka said. “We’ve got it all planned out.”</p><p>“I’m sure you do. You’re resourceful young men and women. But the Council still has friends among the Dai Li, and I can’t guarantee that they won’t know you’re coming.”</p><p>The Dai Li. Aang made not even a cursory effort to hide his scorn. Far be it for him of all people to reproach King Kuei for trying to be optimistic, but it was difficult to see his decision to accept the Dai Li’s pledge of allegiance following the end of the Hundred Year War as anything other than feckless naivete. Treachery such as theirs was too dangerous to neglect with something as ineffectual as Kuei’s admonishments, which had amounted to little more than a bureaucratic slap on the wrist. Nevertheless, the Dai Li had been back in their old stomping grounds for some time now, and mention of them never failed to inspire anything short of the same old disgust. Now that they knew of their ties to the Business Council, contempt for them only grew.</p><p>Regardless, they needed dirt on the Council’s ringleader, and few were better equipped than Toph and Sokka to get it. The five of them walked out into Gato’s backyard, where there was a small, immaculately tended garden against the house and little else. Aang tossed Sokka the bison whistle, and its silent report heralded a prompt arrival from Appa.</p><p>“Is something wrong, Councilman?” Aang asked. Lines of worry bracketed Gato’s mouth.</p><p>“I don’t mean to be presumptuous, Avatar Aang,” he began as if working through the wording himself, “but I think Katara should go with Toph and Sokka.”</p><p>Katara said nothing, but she did grip Aang’s hand.</p><p>“You don’t need to worry about us, Gato,” Toph assured. “We’ve kicked Dai Li ass before, we can do it again.”</p><p>“That may be true,” there was a passing hint of indignation on Toph’s face at the suggestion of doubt, “but here, in Cranefish, I am at least able to warn you of the Council’s plans and movements. I can’t keep an eye on you in Ba Sing Se. I cannot overstate the danger the Council poses to you, now that you pose a danger to it—should something happen, there would be nothing I could do to negotiate any help.”</p><p>Appa’s roar rolled across the sky. He was drawing closer.</p><p>“Katara,” Gato went on, “you should go with them to Ba Sing Se. The three of you together stand a better chance of thwarting the Dai Li, and with the Avatar and myself here, we can work to keep the Council off your back.”</p><p>“Your call, guys,” Sokka said. The telltale <em>whoosh</em> of Appa’s tail was close enough now that he would be arriving in short order.</p><p>Katara locked eyes with Aang. Her grip tightened.</p><p>“I think Councilman Gato has a point, Katara,” Aang whispered. “I can handle the Council. You go keep Toph and Sokka out of trouble.”</p><p>“We can hear you,” Toph said.</p><p>Katara laughed. “And who’s going to keep you out of trouble?”</p><p>“No one.” He winked. “You’ll just have to trust me.”</p><p>They kissed. Her arms snaked around his neck, his around her back, answering his displeasure at the idea of being apart from her by pouring all of himself into that one embrace. She responded in kind. He was only vaguely aware of the sounds Sokka and Toph were making.</p><p>Appa, much to the latter pair’s gratitude, landed with an enthusiastic boom, and tore Aang and Katara’s attention from one another. He roared gleefully.</p><p>“People are sleeping, big guy! You gotta try and be quiet!” Aang hushed, laughing as he wrapped him as best he could in an affectionate hug. “It’s good to see you too, buddy.”</p><p>Katara, Toph and Sokka clambered onto Appa’s back, and waved to Gato as they settled into the saddle.</p><p>Katara leaned down from Appa’s head and took Aang’s hand in her own.</p><p>“Say hi to Iroh and Momo for me, if you stop by,” Aang said.</p><p>“We will. Be careful, hon.”</p><p>“You too.” He kissed her hand. “Love you.”</p><p>“Love you, too.” She took up Appa’s reins and gave them a flick. “Let’s hit it, big guy. Yip-yip!”</p><p>With that, they were off. Aang waved until they could not see him anymore, and he wished for them to be above the clouds as soon as possible so they could be under the stars. He was so transfixed on their flight, in fact, that he could not turn around in time to stop the blows that struck all across his body. He locked up and went down.</p><p>Qi-blocked. Unable to so much as turn his head, he stared at Gato, towering over him, from the corners of his eyes.</p><p>Before he could even spit his name through clenched teeth, Gato leaned down and struck again, and his vision went black. When he awoke, it was in darkness and in chains.</p><p>There was no telling how much time had passed. Torches on the wall behind him cast livid shadows on the floor, their dim, flickering red light split by the chains that pulled his arms taut. His shoulders ached. Shackles hung from his ankles and secured him to the floor. The only indication of the room’s size were the guttering rushlights that skirted the walls, not because of the light they offered, for it was sickly and wan, but because of how many there were. Aang could not even see the other end of the room that they led towards. The clattering of the chains echoed throughout the chamber, rolling from one end to the other, the ebb and flow of a crystalline tide. His muscles tensed, bulged against the inside of his skin as he tested the chains—sturdy and limiting. Aang could not bend, and the chains would not break.</p><p>“Gato!” he shouted loud enough that his head pounded in response. There was no indication that anyone else was in the room with him save for the intuition that told him so. “Gato, get over here!”</p><p>His intuition was rewarded. Footsteps approached, slow thunder in the expanse of the chamber, and a figure stepped against the sinuous edge of the light, the shadows painting his face a stark and hateful grimace.</p><p>Gato.</p><p>“Explain yourself,” Aang growled.</p><p>“Or what?” It was hard to tell if Gato had shrugged, or if the shadows cast by the torches had merely made the illusion of it. “You aren’t in much of a position to make any such demands, I don’t think.”</p><p>Aang stared at him through his eyebrows.</p><p>“That’s it,” Gato laughed, “that’s the look. Anger. Abject rage. The prelude to the Avatar State.”</p><p>“If the Avatar State is what you want, I’m happy to oblige.”</p><p>“Oh, believe me, it is.” Gato circled Aang slowly, walking further than the chains would allow Aang to turn and see. “I’m counting on it. Quite anxiously, in fact. The mighty Avatar, rendered no more useful than us lowly non-benders by a few simple pokes. Humbling, isn’t it?”</p><p>Aang’s tattoos flared with an incipient glow. “It was you. You’re the one manipulating the Council. You’re the one trying to outlaw bending.”</p><p>“Oh, I’m not trying. I’m succeeding. Sozin, Ozai, Liling, even you—for too long, benders have had their boot to the neck of the common man. What I do now carves a place in the world for those who your people have been subjugating for centuries. The winds of rebellion are blowing, Avatar.”</p><p>Gato completed his circuit and stopped in front of Aang. “And I will not allow you, in this life and most certainly not in the next, to undo what I have worked so hard to achieve. So yes, Aang, the Avatar State is precisely what I want.”</p><p>He leaned in close enough that Aang could feel his breath on his face when he spoke.</p><p>“Because you shall enter it, and I shall kill you.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Yes Toph punching the escarpment wall is absolutely inspired by Iko Uwais punching the shit out of his cell wall at the beginning of The Raid 2</p><p>After reading CameraLux's <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22830055/chapters/54562153">The Quest is a Metaphor</a> and McShane's <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/110718">Trust and New Tricks</a>, I felt like taking my own crack at a "Sokka teaching Toph how to swim" scene," so if you liked it, thank them! And give those fics a read!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Katara, Sokka and Toph travel back to Ba Sing Se and uncover the full scope of the Council's plot; Aang resists Gato's attempts to force him into the Avatar State.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Here's some Aangst</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>If Katara had gripped Appa’s reins any harder, the leather would have worn trenches in her palms.</p><p>Cranefish City was two days behind them, and Ba Sing Se bustled below them. The parks and markets were writhes of people, all blissfully unaware of the iniquities of the world beyond their walls. So long as they kept their eyes averted from the Lower Ring, as most residents of Ba Sing Se made efforts to do, there were scarcely any reminders that the city’s illusion and grandeur were but tenuous microcosms. A lot had changed. Ba Sing Se had not. Strangely, its persistence was comforting, though Katara suspected that had little to do with the city itself.</p><p>As if reading her mind, Appa let out a dispirited low. She ran her hand through his fur, across the arrow on his head. “I know, buddy,” she whispered. “I’m worried about him too.”</p><p>Worried about Toph, too, whose father had been shown to be far more wicked than any of them could have conceived. Brusque as she was, she made no indication of the smothering grief Katara was certain she was concealing, but it was there. Covetously guarded, but there. Katara turned to ask her about it only to discover that she was fast asleep, arms crossed, one looped through Sokka’s and her head against his shoulder.</p><p>“What?”</p><p>There must have been some involuntary expression on Katara’s face that prompted the question. It had been Sokka that spoke. The corners of her mouth quirked upwards. “What’s going on with you two?”</p><p>Instead of the deflection she expected, some witty rejoinder of denial about how it was simply because Toph could not see anything when they were riding on Appa, or that none of them had gotten much sleep in the past few days, there came a small smile to his face. Not sad, but secluded. Wanting. Reflected in his eyes when he looked at Toph. “Wish I knew.”</p><p>Katara remembered Aang’s remark about Sokka acting strangely the other night, and it seemed to her that she had discovered why. She gave a consoling smile.</p><p>Appa began a slow descent towards the financial district. Seeing no Dai Li agents on the way in did little to abate Katara’s suspicion, for seeing them nowhere meant it was likely they were everywhere, so she did her best to set them down in as inconspicuous a spot as she could find. Flying in on a six-legged bison did not do wonders for them.</p><p>They made landfall in one of the Middle Ring’s numerous parks, in a small copse penned in by other trees. Sokka nudged Toph awake, and as she unthreaded her arm from his, yawning wide, she put palm to his face and pushed him over the edge of Appa’s saddle. It seemed a gentle gesture, sluggish and languid, and that it was still enough to throw Sokka from Appa’s back and send him thudding onto the earth was a testament to her prodigious strength. Katara laughed.</p><p>“Glad you had a good sleep,” he said, voice muffled by the grass.</p><p>“Me too,” she stretched. “Glad you have soft, unmanly shoulders. They make great pillows in a pinch.”</p><p>“Hilarious.” Sokka stood and slapped the dust from his clothes. “You still got that passport?”</p><p>“You mean our only ticket into Lao’s records and the thing this entire plan hinges on?” Toph reached into her shirt pocket and flashed a card emblazoned with the Beifong family sigil of a flying boar—the same pass she had used to grant them passage to Ba Sing Se during the war, which she had kept hold of in case it ever again came in handy. “What, were you worried I lost it in my sleep?”</p><p>“Well, considering how often you lose your temper, I wouldn’t put it past you.”</p><p>“Oh-ho, funny man.”</p><p>Of course, Katara said nothing of how Sokka helped Toph down from the saddle. Nothing of how he lowered her to the ground with his hands on her waist, or the casual, uncharacteristic ease with which Toph let him. She simply laughed to herself. “You two are in rare form today, aren’t you?”</p><p>“Rare?” Toph reared her head. “Maybe for meathead, here.”</p><p>“Please,” Sokka said, “you wouldn’t know what comedy was if you hadn’t met me.”</p><p>“Wouldn’t know what ‘annoying’ meant either, if that’s the metric we’re using.”</p><p>Sokka scoffed and turned to Katara. “Are you hearing this?”</p><p>“Oh, I’m hearing it, all right,” she laughed. “Come on, let’ s get a move on.” She turned to pat Appa’s head. “Go say hi to Momo, buddy. We’ll call you when we need you.”</p><p> </p><p>If it were not for the name being engraved in gold, the Ba Gua Credit Union building might have been mistaken for a temple. A paifang stood over the arched bridge leading to the entrance of a building that lay in the middle of a pool of water so clear it could have been liquid glass, circumscribed by bronze lions with green patinas. With a penchant for ornamentation as strong as Lao’s, it was clear why he did his banking here.</p><p>“Everyone clear on the plan?” Toph asked as they crossed the bridge.</p><p>“We shut up and you do the talking,” Sokka said. “We get it.”</p><p>Toph grinned. “I like these plans.”</p><p>They shoved open the doors, the building’s interior as ostentatious as its exterior, and marched to the teller. Katara said a silent thank-you that there were no Dai Li inside; whatever Aang and Gato were doing back in Cranefish, it appeared to be working.</p><p>“You there!” Toph pointed at no one. Sokka turned her by her shoulders to face the teller. “We need to take a look at Lao Beifong’s bank records.”</p><p>Katara glued her arm to her side to keep herself from burying her forehead into her palm.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” the teller laughed, eyes searching Katara’s and Sokka’s for an answer to the question of if the woman before her was in fact serious, “but I’m afraid I can’t do that.”</p><p>“Did Mister Beifong not send word of our arrival?” Toph asked as if speaking scandal. “I’m dreadfully sorry, he’s a touch scatterbrained these days. We’re here on his behalf.”</p><p>The teller’s eyes widened as the passport slid across the desk, through the port in the bars that surrounded her station. “Oh, my goodness, my deepest apologies! Right away, come, follow me.”</p><p>“No apology necessary, darling,” Toph said, her grin nearly giving them away. Katara felt viscerally uncomfortable hearing Toph talk like this, and judging by Sokka’s bolt-stiff posture, so did he. “We’re going to need to take a look at Mister Beifong’s records from the last… six months.”</p><p>“Six months!” the teller opened the door to their archives. “We’ve always known Lao to be an impeccable bookkeeper.”</p><p>“Fire,” Toph blurted out, sensing the question on the rise. “Fire, there was a fire. Positively dreadful. No one was hurt, thankfully, but many of Mister Beifong’s records were claimed in the blaze. We just need to make copies of the ones we lost.”</p><p>“Oh, dear. Well, we’re happy to help in any way we can. Lao is one of our most loyal customers.” The teller handed Toph the key to the strongbox containing the records they were looking for. “Will there be anything else?”</p><p>“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Toph said, and Katara hoped that her widening eyes did not betray that they had been lying through their teeth since they walked through the door. They had not discussed this beforehand. “Mister Beifong also requested we retrieve something from his safety deposit box. Might you direct us to it once we’re finished here?”</p><p>“Of course, Miss…”</p><p>“Nothing! Uh, Naoting. Miss Naoting.”</p><p>The teller ducked out of the room with a saccharine, service-industry smile.</p><p>“For someone who can always tell if a person is lying,” Katara said, “you are profoundly terrible at it.”</p><p>She shrugged. “Subtlety isn’t my strong suit.”</p><p>Sokka flicked her shoulder, and Katara stifled a laugh at him reacting more to the impact than Toph did. “Thanks for keeping us in the loop about springing for Lao’s safety deposit box, by the way.”</p><p>“You two aren’t supposed to be talking anyway. Don’t worry about it, I got it under control. Now chop-chop, get to sleuthing.”</p><p>Katara and Sokka began rifling through Lao’s records. It was clear the man had money, but seeing the actual numbers was staggering. More staggering than that, however, were the enormous loans he had taken out—all of them co-signed with the sigil of a spider with a sundial on its back.</p><p>“Check it out,” Katara pointed to it. “Same emblem as the one we found in Lao’s office.”</p><p>“How is this this a legally acceptable signature?” Sokka said. “You mean to tell me I could have been signing things by drawing smiley faces on ‘em my whole life?”</p><p>“You’d have to be able to draw for that to work,” Toph said, and Sokka stuck his tongue out at her for lack of anything else to say. “What are you guys looking at?”</p><p>“Contracts for loans,” he said. “Huge ones. Like, really huge. And they’re all co-signed with that spider sigil.”</p><p>“Why would Lao need a co-signer? He has the money.”</p><p>“Not for these ones,” Katara said. “We’re talking millions. More than even Lao can afford, I think. Or at least more than he’s willing to. Which probably means whoever this sigil belongs to is using Lao’s connections to vicariously fund their operations and is holding the debts over his head as leverage.”</p><p>“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” Toph shrugged.</p><p>They pocketed the contracts, a few bank statements, a portfolio containing a selection of investments made in other Business Council members’ enterprises, and left the archives. It was not enough on its own to fulfill their original objective of identifying who was holding Lao’s reins, but it was enough to prove that there was a link between his money and whomever the conspirator was that the spider sigil belonged to. Maybe enough to get a few of the Councillors nailed for tax fraud, too. Hoping that Lao’s safety deposit box would yield more concrete results, they entered the vault next.</p><p>The teller showed them to Lao’s strongbox, and inside they found letters. Stacks of them.</p><p>“What are these?” Katara took the letters up and inspected the signees. None of them bore the spider. “Correspondences between Lao and…”</p><p>Her voice trailed off. Sokka and Toph turned to her in anticipation. “Lao and who?” Sokka asked.</p><p>“The governors of every Fire Nation colony in the Earth Kingdom,” Katara could not keep the awe out of her voice. “They’re pooling their resources.”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>The words barely came to her lips. “Because they’re planning to unite. Assimilate into one massive colony. And if all the other colonies’ leaders are working with the Business Council… Do you guys know what this means?</p><p>“A Fifth Nation,” Sokka said. “One without any benders.”</p><p>“And an army big enough to challenge the Earth Kingdom under Business Council control.”</p><p>Sokka snatched the letters from her hands, and she watched as his eyes danced across their contents. “Why would Lao keep these? Wouldn’t it be safer if he had destroyed them?”</p><p>“Collateral, if I had to guess,” Katara said. “To blackmail anyone that tried to back out of the arrangement.” She couldn’t resist a triumphant laugh. “This isn’t what we came for—it’s even better!”</p><p>“Oh, we’ve got the Council by the ass, now,” Toph pounded her fist into her palm. “The colonies are all coalition governments between the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation. We bring this stuff to Kuei and Zuko, they’ll have all the authority they need to gut the Business Council like a fish.”</p><p>The three of them knocked their fists together. “Let’s get to the palace and inform Kuei,” Katara said as she turned to the exit.</p><p>All they would have to do is get past the Dai Li that had since swarmed the lobby.</p><p>The teller pointed them in their direction, and before Katara could warn Sokka and Toph, the safety deposit vault’s massive metal door slammed shut and locked them inside. “Damn it!”</p><p>“What?” Some of the letters scattered to the floor as Sokka jumped. “What happened?”</p><p>“The Dai Li found us. They’ve locked us inside.”</p><p>“You’d think these guys would have learned their lesson by now,” Toph moved to the door. “One moment, please.”</p><p>The door blasted off the hinges, crunching the tiled floor with a deafening boom and wrapping around Toph as she rolled across its flattened face, cladding her head-to-toe in impenetrable metal. She planted her fists into the floor as she rolled to her feet, turning the tiles beneath her knuckles to dust.</p><p>The Dai Li agents froze.</p><p>Toph creaked as she stood. “If any of you harbour any strong attachments to the current shape of your skull, it’s probably best that you leave right about now.”</p><p>None of them moved. Whether it was for fear or determination was unclear.</p><p>Toph shrugged and pulled a cowl of metal over her face. “Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.”</p><p>Sokka nudged Katara’s arm. “Should we—”</p><p>“Run? Yeah, probably.”</p><p>Just as they launched from the vault, the fight exploded. The bars around the tellers’ desks wrenched out of the ceiling and speared through the air. Stone gloves, the Dai Li’s principal armament, crashed into the metal encasing Toph’s body; she pulled them free, smacked them away like insects, crushed them to pieces. Sokka batted one away with the flat of his axe blade while Katara redirected the others, or reduced them to dust with point-defense darts of pressurized water as the two of them made for the exit.</p><p>One slipped through and grabbed a fistful of Sokka’s tunic, pulling him towards the bender that had cast it. Toph charged the agent before Sokka got in range and there was an audible <em>crunch </em>when she crushed her gauntleted fist into his chest. He ragdolled across the lobby floor, his sternum little more than powder.</p><p>The momentum sent Sokka into a roll. He thudded to a stop at the exit where more Dai Li agents were rushing in. One grabbed him, pinned him to the door frame and Sokka pulled the beard of his axe down into the agent’s shoulder, wrenched down, tore it free and spun, the blade catching the man below the cheekbone and opening his head sideways. A torrent of water blasted the surrounding agents out of the lobby as Katara closed in. “Toph,” she shouted, “time to go!”</p><p>Sokka pulled out the bison whistle and blew. Appa was inbound. Katara gathered water from the surrounding pool into a swirling pillar and held it, waited for Toph to make the entrance.</p><p>Stone hands clung to her, a dozen of them, her steel-plated feet grinding along the floor as she fought their pull. Any that she peeled away were replaced a moment later. Metal began to rip away from her.</p><p>More Dai Li agents were rushing towards them from across the bridge. Katara bent a banner of water over it and froze the pool when they leapt in to flank. “Toph, come on!”</p><p>Toph was screaming defiance inside her helmet. Her hands gripped the frame of the door. She hauled herself out, the suit peeled away from the front, she leapt from its confines and blasted it and all the hands that clung to it back into the building, clotheslining one of her pursuers. Katara sent the pillar of water in behind it just as Appa came roaring, crashing through the paifang across the bridge. He landed, drifted to a stop, they clambered onto his back, and he burst back into the sky.</p><p>“Perfect timing, Appa!” Sokka shouted. “Let’s get to Kuei, fast!”</p><p>Katara risked a glance over the side of Appa’s head and saw precisely what she did not want to see. Shadows coursed through the alleyways, darting from house-to-house, across streets, over rooftops—the Dai Li were on the move, and they were headed for the palace.</p><p>As Appa cleared the Upper Ring and the palace courtyard sprawled out below them, Katara saw agents sprinting after them, bounding up the steps, pooling in the courtyard and waiting to intercept them. “There’s no way we can land,” she said. “Not unless we smash the doors down.”</p><p>“Well then let’s smash the doors down!” Toph said, unable or unwilling to hide her excitement at the idea.</p><p>Katara thought about it for perhaps not as long as she should have. “Let’s smash the doors down.”</p><p>Appa let out a growl that Katara took as assent. She hopped the ridge of the saddle and gripped its edge until her hands ached.</p><p>The palace doors grew larger, larger, faster, already towering. Sokka gathered Katara and Toph under his arms. Appa ducked his head.</p><p>They all held their breath.</p><p>A beat.</p><p>The doors burst inwards in clouds of scattering metal and splinters, spinning out of their hinges, slamming against the walls of the main hall with enough force to send cracks rippling across the polished stone. The walls rushed past them all in a green blur before opening into the throne room and Appa landed hard, feet furrowing through the massive slabs of the floor, drifting across the throne room until coming to a thundering halt at the foot of the dais that held Earth King Kuei’s throne.</p><p>Palace guards converged on them at once. Monoliths lifted out of the floor and threatened to flatten them. Toph launched afoot to hold them in place.</p><p>Atop the dais, from behind the throne, Earth King Kuei appeared. “What is the meaning of this?!”</p><p>“Call your guards off, Kuei,” Katara shouted, “it’s us!”</p><p>“The Avatar’s friends?”</p><p>“We have names, you know,” Sokka said. He and Katara jumped down off Appa’s back, and with a cry from Kuei the monoliths hovering overhead retreated into the cavities they had left in the floor. Toph jumped down and shoved past her friends to the base of the steps leading to the throne.</p><p>Dai Li agents surged into the throne room and surrounded them. Appa reared and bared his gnashing teeth. Katara and Sokka readied themselves.</p><p>Kuei trembled from behind his throne. “What is going on here?! My goodness, this is far too much excitement for me!”</p><p>“Your Majesty,” Toph jabbed a finger at him, “shut the fuck up and listen to me.”</p><p>She explained to him all that they had discovered. The campaign against benders in Cranefish City, the Business Council’s machinations, the assassins, the militarized police force, Lao Beifong’s correspondence with the colony governors, their plan for a Fifth Nation—everything. Katara watched intently the men around them, the palace guards and Dai Li agents, all steadfast and ready to destroy them. Spears of ice hung in the air at her command. Sokka crossed his weapons over himself. Appa stamped his feet, nostrils flaring with predatory huffs.</p><p>“You need to send word to Fire Lord Zuko,” Toph concluded her explanation, “and get your royal ass to Cranefish, pronto.”</p><p>Kuei had since eased back into his throne. He was a perpetually nervous and skittish man, and the distant, contemplative glare he took on as he deliberated on what Toph had told him did little to mask his unease. “If what you say is true, I will send for the Fire Lord at once. We will bring our armies to the city and—”</p><p>“No!” Katara said, and the men in the standoff flinched at her voice. She thought they might pounce, but they stayed their feet. “Marching into the city will give the Council the exact leverage it needs to stoke more hatred against benders! Your Majesty, if you and Fire Lord Zuko bring your armies to the gates, innocent people will be murdered in the streets. Pogroms will break out, and the Council will martyr themselves trying to fight you. Benders will go down in history as exactly what the Council makes them out to be.”</p><p>“It’s diplomacy or bust on this one, Kuei,” Toph said. She tucked her lip beneath her teeth and whistled, and Sokka slid her the leather satchel containing the documents they had taken from the archives. She threw it onto the dais. “You have everything you need to oust the Business Council peacefully, and do it with public support. Send those documents to Zuko, along with a letter explaining why they’re important, and get him here, now. Make sure to tell him we’re involved.”</p><p>Kuei’s eyes danced between them and his men, a fretful expression marking his face once again. “Stand down,” he called after a tense silence. The men eased away, reluctantly, and Katara, Sokka, Toph and even Appa let out a collective exhale. “What will you three do?”</p><p>“If we had the time,” Sokka said, “we’d fly on over to Capital City and let Zuko know ourselves, but we’ve got to get back to Cranefish and let Aang and Councilman Gato know what the plan is. They’re waiting on us.”</p><p>The three of them climbed onto Appa and he thundered towards the exit. By Kuei’s command, they were allowed to leave unmolested by the guards. “Oh, by the way!” Toph called with a grin. “Your Dai Li flunkies are in good with the Business Council! Do with that information what you will! Especially if it involves public humiliation or execution!”</p><p>They did not wait to see the expressions in the agents’ faces before they took off. Before they knew it, the oppressive heat and urban stench of Ba Sing Se gave way to the cold, crisp air of the skies overhead.</p><p>They had gotten more than they came for, more than Katara even thought possible. Enough to blow the bottom out of the Business Council and stop their plot dead. The twilight of their corruption was upon them, their demise barreling ever closer. So why could she not dispel the pit in her stomach?</p><p>With a flick of the reins, Appa double-timed it through the air. Sokka grabbed hold of the saddle’s edge, Toph his arm. “What’s the matter?” he asked.</p><p>“I’ve just got a bad feeling.” Her tone left no room for argument, and even if it had, Toph and Sokka knew her well enough to trust in her instincts as much as she did.</p><p>And that was good, because they reached Cranefish by nightfall, and in the three nights they had been gone the war had already begun.</p><p> </p><p>The tip of Aang’s staff was speared between his shoulder blades, slowly forcing him forward until the chains threatened to pop his arms out of their sockets. “How does it feel, Avatar?”</p><p>Aang pretended to assess the question. “Pretty good, actually. I’ve had this knot in my shoulder for a little while—”</p><p>Gato growled and swiped the staff clear to pace the platform in frustration. It had been a long night of little results. Aang had made certain of that. “You know, you could make a pretty good masseuse,” he said. “Seriously, it’s like, completely gone.”</p><p>A shin swung into his ribs and winded him for a moment. His martial arts conditioning rendered the blow largely painless, even immobilized as he was, and being an airbender, his breath returned shortly after. Aang could not deny himself the pleasure of thinking about the fury Gato must have been feeling, that his attempts at torture were being thwarted by the teachings of a people that had been dead for more than a century, a people that he hated. Aang’s smug obstinacy was not doing him many favours beyond the rather selfish gratification of fucking with someone, but it was reward enough to tough the contusions.</p><p>The kick did, however, inch his neck against the pair of dao crossed around it, the flats of their blades cold on his shoulders, waiting for the exact moment that Gato’s abuse caused his tattoos to alight.</p><p>“You will enter the Avatar State,” Gato spat, thumping Aang’s staff, his prize, on the planks of the platform. “The Cycle will end with you. It’s only a matter of time. And how much pain you wish to endure.”</p><p>“Can I have something to eat first?” Aang asked.</p><p>Gato narrowed his eyes.</p><p>“Up to you,” he regretted his shrug as the edges of the dao scraped up the sides of his neck. “If I starve to death, you don’t get what you want.”</p><p>“I’m beginning to think it would be worth it.” With an explosive sigh, Gato left the dim light. A door thudded open at the end of the chamber, briefly silhouetting him in the light of the corridor beyond before it slammed shut again. He returned in short order with a plate of scrap meat, which he skidded across the floor into Aang’s knees.</p><p>Aang stared at it for a moment. “I’m a vegetarian.”</p><p>Gato kicked the plate against the wall in a fleeting explosion of rage and swung the staff into the centres of the chains securing Aang’s arms, rattling his shoulders in their sockets. It hurt, though Aang did not give him the satisfaction of knowing it.</p><p>Gato knelt in front of him, his thin lips retreating over his teeth in a carnivorous snarl. “I sent your friends into a trap, Avatar. Sokka, Toph, your precious Katara—I played them right into the Dai Li’s hands. And believe me when I say that the Dai Li’s cruelty is rivaled only by their imagination. When they capture them, and I promise you they will, your friends will cease to be so much as memories. They will lie in chains, much like you do now, flogged to the bone and begging, screaming for mercy as their eyes are boiled from their skulls. Just as you could not be there to keep Sozin from wiping your repulsive species from the face of the world, so shall you be absent when your friends’ lives are ripped from them strip by bloody strip. How does it feel? To know that in a more than a hundred years, nothing has changed? That you have never risen above the weakness you were born into with that cult of doddering old men? That you’re still the same gutless little imp you’ve always been? Do you understand me, Avatar? Your friends are dead, because of me.”</p><p>Aang opened his eyes. “Sorry, did you say something?”</p><p>Gato barked an order at his men and the dao disappeared from Aang’s neck. Their footsteps faded into the chamber’s bowels.</p><p>“Same time tomorrow?” Aang asked. “Whenever that is?”</p><p> </p><p>By Aang’s guess, it was the second night, and he sensed them before he saw them. Their approaching footsteps ached through the reddened skin on his wrists and ankles, and the darkness smeared against itself. He breathed in. He breathed out.</p><p>Gato was not among them.</p><p>“Councilman couldn’t make it this time?” Aang spoke deliberately cheerfully. “That’s too bad. If I’m honest, though, he wasn’t much of a conversationalist.”</p><p>The footsteps drew closer. There was someone new among them. They were shuffling.</p><p>“Is that his replacement? Hey, do you mind if I get you to loosen these chains a bit? My shoulders are killing me.”</p><p>They stopped. A man was shoved across the waning border of the firelight, landing on his knees. His hands were bound and he was muzzled by a cloth gag.</p><p>Aang’s eyes shot wide. “Councillor Manyu?”</p><p>Blood pooled in his sunken cheeks and in the pockmarks of his face. His hair, normally combed back without a single errant hair out of place, hung around his head in blood-clotted clumps and tangles. The silk nightwear he wore had been stretched and torn—he had been snatched right from his bed.</p><p>“Here’s who sent the assassins,” spoke a voice from beyond the light. One of Gato’s men. A dagger scraped out of its sheathe and Manyu pleaded silently, a desperate sob trying to claw through the cloth as the guard pressed it to his throat. “Should I kill him?”</p><p> Swords returned to Aang’s shoulders. All traces of mischief vanished. “No!”</p><p>“Really? Even after what he tried to do to you and your friends?”</p><p>When Aang had imagined discovering whose behalf the assassins had worked on, he had thought it would come with some measure of relief. That putting a face to the faceless might offer a small comfort. He was filled only with anger, now. “Let him go. Nobody needs to die.”</p><p>“Then stop me,” the guard challenged, and then the Councillor’s throat opened onto the floor.</p><p>For a moment, Aang’s tattoos flickered, and the swords tightened around his neck. “No!”</p><p>Manyu writhed in a widening pool of his own blood, black in the overwhelming lightlessness of the chamber. He twitched, gurgled, then stopped.</p><p>The chains creaked as Aang tried to curl his arms. Cold steel edges pressed firm against his throat, waiting for him to lapse for even a moment, ribbons of firelight dancing on the blades. “He didn’t deserve to die.”</p><p>“Doesn’t it make you angry?” the guard taunted. “Seeing a person butchered like a dog, and even you, the Avatar, were powerless to do anything about it?”</p><p>Again, for just a moment, his tattoos flickered. The dao blades stung against his neck. He wanted to tempt fate, try his luck, give in and lash out. If he was just fast enough, he might break free in time to avoid having visited upon him the same fate as Councillor Manyu.</p><p>But that compulsion was fleeting. It was suicide to try it. So he replaced it with a deep inhale and a torrent of wind from his lungs, aimed at the voice, at Manyu’s killer, and he was rewarded with the sound of the man tumbling across the chamber floor into the long dark. He glanced down and saw that the edges of the blades at his neck trickled red. Part of him dared them to do it, thinking that he would be back a few decades down the road and his predecessor would not be beholden to the same tenets of pacifism as he was.</p><p>“Don’t kill him!” the guard barked from afar. “He’s not budging.” Aang heard susurrations in the dark, conspiratorial whispers. The only words he could make out were “storm,” and then a name. One from his past. One that still spiked his blood when he heard it. Someone laughed. “Open it up!”</p><p>The blades retreated from Aang’s neck and the guards wielding them stepped off the small platform that was his prison. If there was any comfort to be had in that, Aang could not find it, for his mind raced after the name he had heard whispered in the dark. What did she have to do with this? With Cranefish? Was she here? Impossible. The wood beneath him rumbled, rattling the shackles on his ankles against the raw skin. Dust stirred from the walls as thunder resounded from within them.</p><p>Chains and counterweights. He was ascending. The firelight disappeared over the edge of the platform as he rose into the blackness, until the ceiling opened and drenched him in moonlight and rain. Thunder shook his teeth. He looked up. Rainwater stung his eyes and hammered the platform with audible smacks. The platform thudded to a stop. Mountains walled him in, their snowcapped peaks visible only in the brief moments of livid illumination when lighting would set the sky ablaze.</p><p>He was somewhere high. A tower.</p><p>And surrounded by metal in a thunderstorm.</p><p>Aang felt his lungs wither. It was a storm to usurp all others, an apocalypse, an apotheosis, an omen. The scar in his back sang. Each bolt of lightning that hurled through the clouds sent phantom pains stabbing through it, crooked fingers dipping into the skin and running along the tendons around his spine like violin strings. A fight in the Crystal Catacombs. Fire refracting through infinite prisms of emerald. Gouts of blinding blue flame. Eyes like boiled gold. Skyless lightning. Azula.</p><p>Hers was the name that had been spoken. Azula. And the reason why became hauntingly clear.</p><p>He was to die by reliving his own death.</p><p>Panic seized him. He wanted to heave on the chains, wrench them from the supports, heave and scream and defy but he did nothing, as if moving an inch, moving at all would draw the ire of the sky on him. All he would need to escape was a few seconds in the Avatar State. All the lightning needed was a fraction of one. Just like in the Catacombs.</p><p>He dared to think that he could redirect it instead. That the moment the sky opened up he could be quick enough, calm enough to keep it from flash-boiling his insides. Chained as he was, he had to confront the reality that he had never heard of anyone redirecting lightning while completely immobilized before, or extending the pathway beyond one’s body, as he would have to do. Granted, the pool of candidates was small—to his knowledge, only Iroh, Zuko and himself possessed the ability to do it at all. Somehow, that did little to imbue him with confidence.</p><p>Rain continued to drum on his skull and his violent shaking had nothing to do with the cold. Azula. The name was cool mercury in his mind. Azula. His breath was short, convulsive, sucking in mouthfuls of water as the rain coursed down his face. Hot streaks trickled through the cold, oppressive curtain of downpour. Tears. He tried to convince himself that he could do it. That this would not be his death-place. He wept.</p><p><em>I’ll find you again, Katara, </em>he thought, knowing that if he failed, when he failed, that was the only comfort he had. <em>In another life. I’ll find you again.</em></p><p>And then there came a sudden resolve. Where there had been reluctant solace, there was now conviction. Because another voice than his own cut through the miring doubt in his mind, and reminded him of strength.</p><p>
  <em>I won’t accept doing anything less if it means you won’t be okay.</em>
</p><p>And neither would he. Willing the tears from his eyes, he steeled himself, and lay his fingers flat on the chains that bound his arms, enjoining them to be extensions of his limbs. Still the skies hemorrhaged rain, crashing against him, waves breaking on an eternal shore. He breathed deep the freezing air. Lightning struck a mountaintop and a world-sundering boom of thunder followed. Another, this one casting his shadow at his knees, striking somewhere above and behind him. The answering thunder came louder yet and shook his bones, the sky forging itself anew on the anvil of the world.</p><p>He waited, and breathed. Waited for what was once his demise to become his salvation.</p><p>Waited, and breathed.</p><p>The sky broke open.</p><p>Lightning surged through the metal post on his right, bridged across the chain and he felt it sizzling in his veins, felt it turn his blood to roiling fire as it snapped down his arm and swirled in his stomach and the rush of adrenaline came next, the euphoria, the memory of mortal fear in Ozai’s eyes and of being strong enough to resist the death that it invited and the lightning in his body came tearing back up, blood and muscle bursting, his body a conduit, into his other arm and out.</p><p>Streamers arced from link-to-link as the bolt danced up the other chain’s length, and the pillar of metal at its end glowed red, white, then exploded into superheated shrapnel and ragged ribbons of lightning. Shards of metal vapourized the rain on contact. Aang laughed, laughed long and loud enough to challenge the storm that swallowed all other sound. “I did it!” he shouted over the roaring rain. “I did it, Katara!” The tears returned and they were of joy.</p><p>Gathering water into a shimmering blade, he sliced free of the rest of his chains, and the relief of the water on his ravaged skin was almost enough to keep him there on the tower’s peak for a few moments more.</p><p>That compulsion was overpowered, however, by the onset of a searing, seizing rage, and he gathered enough water overhead to smash the platform back into the depths of the chamber below. The torches and rushlights extinguished as a tide rolled through the cavernous room, crashed against the far wall and folded back, spilling across the slickened floor. Guards screamed panicked orders. Water turned to steam beneath Aang’s feet, and he replaced the extinguished fires around the room with columns of his own, two from the palms of his hands and another from the cauldron of his lungs, a breath of flame that licked at the metal ceiling and cast the entire chamber in angry orange light. This was the first time he had seen the room in its entirety, and all the guards that had lined the walls before his waterbending had piled them against the far end. Others surrounded him, bracing themselves on their hands as they vomited water. Aang snatched one by the collar of his armour, his free hand still illuminating the room with tall flames, and he glared daggers through the man’s frightened eyes. Although he had not seen the man’s face before, something told him this was the one that had killed Councillor Manyu. “Where’s your boss,” Aang growled, a threat all on its own.</p><p>“Cranefish!” the man sputtered. “He left last night!”</p><p>“You shouldn’t lie to me.” He was not, but Aang let him think that he suspected he was.</p><p>“I’m not! I swear!” The man turned his head away to cough more water from his lungs, the light of the fire dancing in the whites of his eyes as they came back to stare at Aang’s. “He left in a hurry, said he had something to take care of there!”</p><p>“Where are we?” A look of confusion. “This building, where is it? How far are we from Cranefish?”</p><p>“We’re in the mountains northeast of the city.” The answer came with apprehension, as if the slightest provocation would see him wreathed in skin-melting fire.</p><p>Resisting the urge to headbutt the man’s nose into his eyes, Aang dropped him—threw him—against the floor. If he had an ounce of sense, he would level the whole building before leaving for Cranefish, and indeed he was angry enough for it to be a fleeting but serious consideration, but it went as quickly as it came. The chamber was plunged back into darkness as the flames receded into Aang’s palm, leaving only the faint moonlight that turned the rain to glittering knives as it issued through the hole in the ceiling. He leapt to its edge, silhouetted by a flash of lightning, and leapt from the tower, wanting to put it as far behind him as possible. Not just because he had to reach Cranefish, but because he found quite suddenly that being in its presence sickened him beyond measure.</p><p>It was taller than he had been able to tell from its peak. Tall enough that it stood in defiance of the mountain on whose slope it had been erected. When Aang landed, he cut a trench through the snow as he glided down the mountain’s face, surfing on a sheet of ice until he reached the cyclopean scrabble of rocks where the mountain’s foot projected into the valley below, the ice beneath his feet replaced by a bowl of earth and stone that rocked and tumbled and bounced across the roughening terrain, slick and treacherous from the storm. He drifted to a halt amidst a clutch of firs, one of which had been rampiked by a spear of lightning.</p><p>The tower, now rearing grim and imperious into the dark sky, was a wicked thing, angular and gaunt like a sharpened pagoda. The sight of it next to the mountains made his head spin.</p><p>Then came the crash. He braced himself against a tree, and his hand must have slipped from its wet bark because the next thing he remembered, the loamy soil was cold against his body. Sitting upright and leaning against the tree was enough to make him motion sick. A fist curled around his insides. He blinked hard and felt like vomiting.</p><p>Coming down from the adrenaline of lightning redirection was almost worst than the lightning itself. It was ambrosia, a hymn hummed in the blood, perverse and sublime; that rapturous dance on the precipice of death, his heart threatening all the while to burst inside his own chest and wrap around his ribs in strips of sizzling muscle. Utterly, dangerously intoxicating. Afterwards, his muscles always felt atrophied in comparison. It was too much every time.</p><p>Tree bark scraped the back of his head. The only thing keeping him from freezing to death were the breathing techniques that regulated his body temperature. It was time to go. His vision reeled as he stood, but he stuffed his discomfort away and disobeyed the protests of his body as he took off in a tempest-sprint towards Cranefish, the fires of its factories his lone guiding light.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Aang returns to Cranefish City to find it under martial law, and Katara, Sokka and Toph have still not come back, leaving him alone against the Council's forces; a long-awaited confrontation takes place; by nightfall, the true nature of the Civic Protection Act is revealed.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is basically a wuxia film at this point</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Rainwater trickled into the crags between the flagstones. The only movement in the waterlogged streets of the city, eerie in the grey wolf-light of dawn, was the rainfall itself, and the columns of armed guards patrolling the streets. Their assertive scarlet plumes clung to the backs of their conical helmets, the fine hairs laden by water and darkened to a wine-red by the rain that, since the storm of the previous night, had barely subsided. Scabbards clacked against the latten rivets on the skirts of their brigandines as they marched. Their footfalls rippled the water pooling in the filthy gutters. There were no citizens in sight.</p><p>Aang furrowed his brow. Gato had been busy at work.</p><p>The Civic Protection Act. It had only been a day since its enactment, and already the Council’s hold on the city had tightened to a constrictive grasp. Aang watched from the shadows as police filed through the streets in armoured processions. The whole city was under order to stay indoors. Even the markets were motionless and dead.</p><p>Nothing had happened yet. Not really. Nothing that forced him to fling from hiding and intervene, at least, but how long would that last? How long until they started rooting out benders by force, contriving reasons to barge into people’s homes whenever they felt so inclined? How long until the riots started? Gato had vanished, and Aang suspected that the threat of Avatar intervention was the only thing keeping the Cranefish powder keg from erupting. So, he stuck to the shadows, waiting for his opportune moment. As he watched it unfold, hour after grueling hour, he could not shake the feeling that this was only a preamble, a dire portent of something much more malicious, and surely, much of that was owed to the wanted posters pasted all across the city that claimed the Avatar had murdered Councilman Manyu.</p><p>Aang grit his teeth when he had seen them upon entering the city, before the sun had crested the horizon. Word of his escape had gotten ahead of him and reached Gato’s ears in plenty of time, it seemed. Even now, he clutched one of the posters in his hand, staring at his paper reflection as he sat in the space between a straggle of ramshackle homes, hiding in the cool refuge, as he had been since re-entering the city following his flight from Gato’s tower, dodging patrols to move from one frigid and filthy retreat to the next, never settling for too long lest the Council’s goons come bearing down on him. His feet were caked in cold mud and obscured up to the shin by nettles. Overhead, an eave of corrugated metal sheltered him from the rain, though his back had to be flush with the wall if he wanted to keep from being doused by the runoff.</p><p>Hopefully the others were making more fruitful progress in Ba Sing Se than he was in Cranefish, because as much as he did not want to admit it, he was eluded as to what to do next. Gato had moved faster, acted more decisively, been one step ahead the entire time and now, with the entire city under the Council’s thumb, Aang had no idea what to do.</p><p>The absence of his friends felt all the more acute in times like these. Sokka, whose tactical acumen and irrepressible humour were sorely missed; Toph, whose unflinching resolve was enough to inspire hope in the most hopeless of circumstances; Katara, whose infectious strength and immeasurable compassion reminded that knee should never be bent, no matter how small the injustice may be—whose absence at his side felt like a hole in the world. While Aang had not flinched beneath Gato’s threats and interrogations during his short captivity, a small part of him feared that there had been a grain of truth in what the Councilman had said about them.</p><p>He expelled these thoughts. If he could not have faith in them, then he could not have faith in anything. Besides, the sudden voices at the mouth of the space in which he hid demanded a more immediate attention.</p><p>Aang sank from his perch beneath the overhang into the nettles, sacrificing dryness for stealth, and edged toward the alley’s egress, where the voices grew louder alongside the rattling of paper and the viscous slathering of adhesive. “So we’re not bringing this guy into the station when we find him?”</p><p>Excellent question, Aang thought.</p><p>“No,” the second of the two officers said as he watched his partner glue another wanted poster to the side of the shack, “there’s some place in Old Town we’re supposed to take him.”</p><p>“Old Town? What’s waiting for him in that dump?”</p><p>“Keep your voice down! It’s off the books. We’re just doing what we’re told, alright?”</p><p>The pair moved on, and if the urgency in the guard’s tone was any indication, Aang would not glean anything further from the common ranks of the city’s police force regarding that line of inquiry. He did not follow. Instead, he stayed a moment in the nettles and mud, and suppressed a shudder—not at the cold, for which he had been regulating his breathing for the past six hours straight just to stave off, but at the destination his capture would see him taken to. Whatever faceless fate awaited him there was irrelevant right now, for the more immediate concern was the derelict district’s neighbouring refinery. The refinery around which the city had sprung five years ago. Earthen Fire.</p><p>And Satoru, whom Gato knew had helped Aang and the others into Lao’s office.</p><p>Aang launched to his feet and ran. He bolted across streets, through mud-choked alleyways and over leaning, rotted fences, fighting the tight iron ball that had formed in his stomach. His mind raced faster than his feet, cursing himself for not realizing sooner the danger Satoru was in, for not being fast enough, prescient enough to prevent what might already be the death of a man who had risked his life for the promise of a future that was a little less grey. He ran and ran and ran, growing suddenly cold as his breathing deregulated, and he was so transfixed on the possibilities of Satoru’s demise as he was hauling through the sodden confines of the city that he did not realize he had sprinted out into the middle of a street directly behind a squad of guards.</p><p>He froze. Just long enough for them to start turning.</p><p>Then he was wind, diving through the threadbare cloth that veiled an open window into a paltry home, landing on the cold wood floor with such a thud that he wondered if the men outside had heard it over the beating rain. He held his breath for fear that they might hear that too, and it nearly burst from his lungs when he spotted the family huddled together in the corner of the room.</p><p>A man and a woman, and a little girl, draped in a blanket that had as many holes in it as the ragged curtain that was supposed to keep the cold from pervading their home. The man had glasses with cracked lenses, the woman an old, ill-healed scar over her eyebrow clearly inflicted by a weapon, and their daughter the only clothes without holes in them. They shook, in coldness and in fear, and Aang’s heart plummeted for the mortal danger he had just placed them in.</p><p>He brought a quaking finger to his lips and begged for their silence and forgiveness. They stared back.</p><p>Fists pounded on the door. “Open up!”</p><p>The mother threw a hand over her daughter’s mouth to stifle a whimper. The father shrugged out of the blanket, away from the desperate warmth of his family, and Aang would not have blamed him if he had right then and there flung the door open and handed him over to the guards. If he did not think they would have arrested them all regardless, Aang would have volunteered himself.</p><p>Instead, the father jerked his head to the wall that separated their living room from their kitchen, and Aang silently complied. “Just a moment!” he called to the guards, doing a serviceable job of keeping the terror out of his voice. He pried his fingers into a gap between a pair of boards and pulled away a hatch, revealing a narrow cavity inside the wall. Aang understood immediately and climbed inside. The men beat on the door again.</p><p>The hatch settled back into place as Aang’s shoulders scraped against the mouldy boards, bowing them slightly as he turned. He sank, and waited, the only light in the narrow space being what little grey overcast was able to permeate the gaps in the walls from outside.</p><p>The father opened the front door.</p><p>Three officers stepped in, judging by the footsteps. One of them spoke, their words too muffled for Aang to discern. Featureless outlines passed by, visible between the boards. There was a question about a disturbance they thought they had seen outside. The father said something non-affirmative. Aang thought he heard the rustling of parchment next, a wanted poster, and assumed the question that followed was one about the whereabouts of the man whose face it depicted. Again, the father spoke denial.</p><p>Silence. More shadows passed by. One of the guards made a sarcastic comment about the home, spurring laughter from his cohorts, and knocked his fist against the wall. Dust stirred from the porous boards and filled the narrow space. Aang slapped a hand over his mouth to suppress a cough.</p><p>He choked it down. Held it back until his chest hurt and his throat burned. Every time he airbent the impurities from his lungs, careful not to move too fast or send a sudden draft between the boards, the next breath drew in more. One guard started to raise his voice and he hit the wall again. The daughter began to cry. Dust stung Aang’s eyes, stabbed at them like a cloud of pins. “What, does it bother you when I do that?” the guard shouted, loud enough now that Aang could make out the words, and hit the wall two more times, harder. His lungs ached.</p><p>“Please, you’re scaring our daughter,” he heard the father plead.</p><p>“You know that the Avatar is responsible for the death of Councilman Manyu?” the guard said.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“And you know what he looks like?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“So you know that he’s hard to miss, and you know that it would be your civic duty to report him to the authorities if you’d seen him, just as it would if you’d seen anyone else violating the stay-at-home order.” Or, more specifically, benders, Aang thought. “Right?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Then I’ll ask you again. Have,” he struck the wall, “you seen,” struck it again, “the Avatar?” Aang saw the hatch loosen with the final impact. He froze to the bone.</p><p>“No,” the father answered. “We haven’t seen him.”</p><p>The shadows were still. Rain pattered on the metal ceiling. Aang heard the girl sniffling directly opposite the wall to his left, the muffled whispers her mother spoke into her hair. The silence was long and palpable. His chest spasmed and contracted with strangled coughs.</p><p>“Then I guess we’re finished here!” the guard said with startling, utterly artificial levity, and ordered his men out of the home. Dull thumps and muffled laughter as they left. The father closed the door behind them.</p><p>Aang brought his robes to his face and hacked and retched, dust and mould crawling out of his throat. The father pulled the hatch away from the wall and reached inside. “Give me your hand, son.”</p><p>He did, and Aang spilled out of the confine, coughing until he bent the rest of the contaminants from his body. They drifted out in a filthy tendril, which he turned to the window and cast outside. “Thank you,” he croaked. Still his eyes burned. A soft hand fell on his shoulder and he felt a ribbon of water course over his clamped eyes. The sensation surprised him for only a moment until it turned to welcome relief. His vision shimmered as irritants were cleansed from his eyes.</p><p>When he pulled away, wiping the remembrance of moisture from his face, he turned to see that the mother had a ring of water circling over her hand. His breath caught in his throat. “You’re a bender,” he said.</p><p>She nodded.</p><p>“What are your names?”</p><p>“I’m Kayra,” she said, then pointed to her husband and daughter. “That’s Sanjuro, and that’s our daughter Yoshie.” Sanjuro looked as if he was about to offer his hand to shake, but stuck it against his side and settled for a bow of his head, evidently recalling the customs of Aang’s heritage. Aang returned the bow, and Yoshie clung to her mother’s skirts.</p><p>“I’m so sorry,” Aang stood. “I never meant to put any of you in danger.”</p><p>“None of that,” Sanjuro said. “None of that.”</p><p>Aang’s eyes caught Yoshie’s, uncertain at the edge of her mother’s legs, and he smiled. “Thank you for protecting me, Yoshie. My name is Aang.”</p><p>She retreated further behind her mother, her small hands clutching at more of Kayra’s skirt. Kayra placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “It’s alright, sweetheart. That’s the Avatar. He saved the world from all sorts of bad men like the ones that were just here.”</p><p>Her shyness seemed to dwindle and that, and she dragged an arm across her eyes to wipe away tears. “Really?”</p><p>“Really,” Aang said, and knelt, “but it wasn’t just me. I had a lot of help from my friends. From really brave people, like you and your parents.”</p><p>“Are you going to save us too?”</p><p>Kayra flustered at the question, despite it having been made no less innocuous for its bluntness, and was about to gently quiet her daughter when Aang responded.</p><p>“Yes,” he said, uncompromising. “I’m going to make things better for you. For everyone.” Wordlessly, Yoshie held her little finger out to him, and Aang hooked his own around it with a laugh, wondering for a moment if any of them could tell he was on the brink of tears. “I promise. And I keep my promises.”</p><p>He stood, and looked to Kayra and Sanjuro. “As a matter of fact, I was on my way to keep one just like it when I stumbled in here. Do you think you could point me to Earthen Fire Refinery? I think I’ve lost my bearings.”</p><p>“It’s a few kilometers east of here,” Sanjuro said, gesturing vaguely to one wall of the living room. “You could get there quickly enough on the main road just outside, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you why that’s a bad idea. Follow it from the shadows as best you can.”</p><p>Aang nodded and moved to the door, stopping before he opened it and taking Sanjuro aside so that Yoshie could not hear. “I think things around here are going to get worse before they get better, but I promise, they will get better. I’ll make sure of it. Please stay safe, Sanjuro.”</p><p>Sanjuro clapped his shoulder, giving him a shake and a smile. “You as well, son. Best of luck to you.”</p><p>Aang smiled back, and nodded to Kayra. Yoshie no longer clung to her mother’s skirts, standing a little more boldly at her side. “Thank you, Kayra. You risked your lives to protect me. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to repay you. But I promise that I’ll make things right.”</p><p>“Will you come back?” Yoshie asked.</p><p>Aang winked at her, and she smiled. “I will.”</p><p>As Aang returned to the misty and blade-grey mire of Cranefish City with the sight of their family etched indelibly into his mind, a family huddled together for warmth beneath a blanket of tatters, a family that had risked what precious little they had scraped together so they could help a complete stranger, he thought that if Gato and the rest of the Business Council had been in front of him, at that moment, he might have done something he would have come to regret.</p><p> </p><p>Even in the anaemic swale of the city’s eastern end, with vision hampered by the unrelenting rain and his progress slowed by the heavy guard presence, the pillar of smoke that Earthen Fire Refinery tossed into the sky had made it easy to stay its path. Evidently, it was still in operation. It was not a surprise that the Business Council members still tasked their workers with showing up to their jobs even when martial law had been enacted, but it made it no less abhorrent.</p><p>By the time Aang reached the refinery, it was mid-afternoon. He entered the yard over the fence once he was confident enough that there were no onlookers to spot him and, using the same security oversight he always did—the mineral chute—he gained entry to the refinery.</p><p>People stared as he walked the halls with brisk, determined strides. He did not bother with subtlety or subterfuge, not anymore. Murmurs rushed past him as he strode through the halls, for they had undoubtedly seen the posters, and heard the lies that spawned them. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone until he was at Satoru’s office and he didn’t bother knocking.</p><p>Satoru jumped upon seeing him enter, the stack of papers he had been collating skewing across his desk, and if the urgency of the situation had allowed it, Aang might have allowed himself a moment’s respite upon finding that he was as-of-yet unharmed. “Good grief, how do you people keep getting in here?”</p><p>Aang slammed the door shut behind him. “We need to go.”</p><p>“What? What do you mean? Go where?”</p><p>“I’ll explain everything, but not here. You aren’t safe.” A question crossed Satoru’s face, and Aang continued before he could ask it. “It’s Gato. It’s been him the whole time. He knows you sold out Lao.”</p><p>“What?!”</p><p>“Shh!” Aang stepped to the front of Satoru’s desk so he was directly across from him. “I know this is bad, and I promise I’ll explain, but right now, you are in serious danger. We have to go.”</p><p>Satoru began gathering things from around his office. A coat and a few belongings. “What about my workers? Won’t they be in danger, too?”</p><p>“I don’t think so,” Aang opened the door just enough to scan the hallway for threats. “No, the Council knows that replacing all the employees would cut into their profits too much. They’re only after you.”</p><p>“Marvelous,” Satoru said as he shrugged on his coat despite the tremble in his limbs. He gestured to the door, stiff and reluctant. “After you.”</p><p>Aang opened the door, and it nearly came crashing back shut on his foot as he spotted the trio of city guards approaching from the end of the hall. “There, uh, doesn’t happen to be another way out of here, does there?”</p><p>“Not unless you burn a hole in the floor, but I’d—”</p><p>Aang drew a corona of flame over the floor and hooked his arm in a downward punch, slicing the flames through the wooden boards.</p><p>“—prefer that you didn’t do that,” Satoru finished with a sigh, and hung his chin to his chest. He and Aang stepped onto the circle scorched into the floor, and no later did the guards burst into the room.</p><p>Aang smiled and waved at them. “Don’t worry guys, we were just leaving!”</p><p>With a stomp, the two of them were plummeting into the room below, Aang whooping and Satoru wailing. All the quiet of the office above vanished in a rush of grinding machinery and hollering factory workers, whose collective attention turned at once to the two men falling from the glowing hole in the ceiling. Gentle plumes of air eased them onto the factory floor, and as they landed, Aang picked Satoru up and took off running, gusts of wind in his wake.</p><p>They were a blur in the city streets. Aang took corners at a drift, laughing as he doused guard patrols in rooster-tailing arcs of water and propelled down the road before their shouts of dismay could so much as reach his ears, though Satoru’s uninterrupted screaming would likely have drowned them out anyway. He ran until they were clear of the city and then further still, peeling out into the bay and drifting across its surface so there were no footprints to follow. The headland reared to his right—he banked hard and made for the coast, for the cave he and the others had made camp in following the night of their near-deaths at the hands of Manyu’s assassins. By the time he reached it, Satoru was drenched to the bone and battling nausea.</p><p>“That wasn’t so bad,” Aang smiled, only a little out of breath as he placed Satoru on the cave’s floor. “Right?”</p><p>“It was terrible and I hated it,” he heaved breathlessly. “Being stuck with Toph in a collapsing mine was less scary than that.”</p><p>Aang laughed and dropped down to sit across from him. “Well, sure. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be stuck in a collapsing mine with.”</p><p>Satoru shrugged assent, still catching his breath even though he had done nothing to exert himself. “Speaking of which, where is she? And Katara and Sokka?”</p><p>“I wish I knew,” Aang’s mood plummeted again. “They left for Ba Sing Se to find information on Lao a couple nights ago. The same night that Gato ambushed me.”</p><p>“So. Gato, huh?”</p><p>Aang nodded, and told him all that he knew, not sparing him the details of Lao Beifong’s involvement, and he admittedly took his time in its telling for he was eager for the respite. Satoru listened with solemn intent, and the sky outside the cave had pinked by the time Aang reached a conclusion. “It’s why you have to stay away from Cranefish until this blows over,” he said. “When Katara, Sokka and Toph come back and see everything that’s happened, they’ll try to get in touch with me. This is the first place they’ll check.”</p><p>“So you want me to stay here.”</p><p>“It’s the safest place for you, right now. It’s only until they get back.”</p><p>“When will that be?”</p><p>“Tonight,” Aang cast a glance to the cave entrance, well alive to the knowledge that he was trying to convince himself of that more than he was Satoru.</p><p>“What if they don’t find me in time?” Satoru shuffled to try and rid himself of the discomfort of the cave floor. “I mean, you don’t exactly know what’s waiting for you in Old Town.”</p><p>“No,” he stood. “But I have a hunch. Tell them to look for me there anyway.”</p><p>Satoru watched as Aang moved for the entrance to the cave. “What will you do now?”</p><p>He halted at the exit and turned, a smile crossing face. “I’m gonna go get arrested!”</p><p> </p><p>Aang all but walked into their hands himself.</p><p>It had been easy enough. All he had done was waltz into the middle of the road and wait, legs crossed and eyes closed in deep meditation, until a patrol happened along. They apprehended him immediately, of course, and their legion footsteps had not been enough to camouflage their hammering heartbeats as they had approached him.</p><p>It was a dreadful plan, really.</p><p>Infinite eyes attended him as he was marched through the streets. He felt them watching, felt the holes their despairing gazes burrowed in his skin. From boarded windows and darkened hovels, the people of Cranefish City looked on as their last vestige of hope fell victim to the same cruelty that had fallen upon them, and Aang tried to avoid thoughts of what that was like. Of the hopelessness that sight had surely caused them. If there had been a different way, one that did not sacrifice, even temporarily, their dreams of freedom from the Council and their police forces, he would have taken it. But assuming his suspicions of what, or rather, who awaited him in Old Town were correct—of which he was quite certain—it was the most direct route to an end to the Council’s tyranny. So, he stomached their grief, trying to put it from his mind.</p><p>There was a sense of finality to it all, walking the streets surrounded by blades and chains. Not that of death, no, not the same fleeting finality he had felt atop Gato’s tower as he had been nearly traumatized into the Avatar State and so to death everlasting, but an immutable suspicion that a conclusion was drawing near. Something penultimate. As he turned his gaze skyward, eyes following the hazy trails of clouds turned crimson by the hues of eventide, he mused that perhaps it was the duality of dusk. Twilight foretelling twilight.</p><p>No. The grim reality, he knew, was that his apprehension would galvanize the city guard, for they knew now that having the Avatar in custody meant nothing stood in their way. All his faith lay in the veracity of his intuition.</p><p>He would come to find that he was right. Night fell as Aang reached Cranefish City’s Old Town district, a hub of the city’s bedless and transient all abandoned by their leaders. Manacles cuffed his wrists and blades twitched at his back as he was guided through its mangled streets. Still it rained, always raining, moonlight turning the drops to silver fibres, and his captors stopped him at a building surrounded on all sides by sloughing retaining walls, the dilapidated homes on their slopes converging and leaning into one another. The entrance was a set of heavy oak doors dotted with rivets of rusted brass. They opened with a deceptive, unnerving silence. Aang was walked inside.</p><p>It was an old training hall. A large mat dominated the center of the room, encircled by darkened arcades. The red paint on the pillars was now a faded brown, some so chipped and splintered it was a concern to think they were load-bearing. Racks of weapons lined the walls in the interstices between them. At the head of the room crouched a dais, penned in by a railing of similar condition to the surrounding pillars, and on the wall that the dais backed onto there was a space where a large ornamental scroll once hung, evidenced only by the bare wooden rod that hung askew from a nail in the wall. Above it, a balcony.</p><p>Aang’s eyes had not yet adjusted enough to spy what hid in the hall’s darker recesses, but he did not need sight to see them. Ambuscading in the darkness of the arcades were lines of men on either side, all kneeling in wait. He heard them breathing, felt their heart rates spike faintly through the old wooden floors as he entered. The guards took the manacles from his wrists and left the building. Silence.</p><p>“You killed Councillor Manyu.” Aang had not expected that to be the first thing he said, but it was, and he said it knowing that Gato was listening. “Why?”</p><p>The wood of the balcony above creaked under the approaching footsteps, dust raining onto the dais. Gato appeared at the balcony’s edge, Aang’s staff still in his hand. Aang could not make out his features yet, but he imagined a wry smile adorning them. “Because he undermined me. Because he sent assassins without my permission and jeopardized my plans. I asked you to Cranefish to kill you, yes, but it would have come in due time. His pride tarnished, he acted without my knowledge or consent, even stooping so low as to outsource the task to benders. I wasn’t lying when I told you I did not know who sent them. At the time, I really didn’t.” His shadowy outline shrugged. “Frankly, I’ve been largely truthful with you, all things considered.”</p><p>“Right,” Aang laughed. “Well, seeing as you’re feeling honest—my friends. Where are they?”</p><p>“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now. Aren’t you curious about my schemes with the Council? Isn’t this where you attempt to plumb the depths of my grand design?”</p><p>“Nope. Just wanna know where my friends are. We can talk about that stuff later when you’re in prison.”</p><p>“Your optimism is quaint,” Gato laughed as he shifted his weight to one leg and cupped a hand around his chin, stroking it in pretend thought. “I’ll tell you what, Avatar. Why don’t we make a game of it? You see my men about the room, don’t you?”</p><p>Aang said nothing.</p><p>“Best them,” Gato went on undeterred by the unresponsiveness, “and I’ll you what I know of your friends.”</p><p>Too easy. “The catch being?”</p><p>“No bending.”</p><p>There it was. Doubtlessly, Gato thought it would prove something, that since a bender’s qi could be blocked and their abilities disabled, the next step was to prove how feeble they were without them. That benders were not so mighty after all. Aang saw the irony in that at once. “What about killing me in the Avatar State? Getting impatient?”</p><p>“As a matter of fact, yes. I am.”</p><p>“Alright then, sure. Deal.”</p><p>Aang could make out enough of Gato’s features, now, to see that he cocked an eyebrow at the response. The breath of the men in the arcades collectively paused. “Well, consider me impressed,” Gato laughed. “I suppose I expected a stricter adherence to that insufferable moral code of yours.”</p><p>“What do you want to prove, Gato?” Aang asked. “That people don’t need to be afraid of benders? That they aren’t as strong as we all think, that they can be beaten? Is that really what you want? What about all the hatred you’ve stoked? What happens to it when you prove to people that benders aren’t the threat you’ve made them out to be? The only way you get to stay in power is by perpetuating the idea that some people or another are threatening your way of life, and they need to be exterminated. But here you are, trying to undo all of it by proving to everyone in this room how trivial the differences you preach really are, all because of your own ego.</p><p>“You’re irrational, Gato. Angry, and stumbling around in the dark like every other dictator with a dream.” Aang shrugged, and quieted his voice upon realizing that it had risen as he had talked. “But you aren’t the kinda guy that listens to reason, so I won’t bother explaining all of that.”</p><p>Gato’s fist trembled in unvoiced rage. Aang fixed his gaze on his stolen staff, still clutched firmly in Gato’s hand, and his tattoos flared in accordance with the clenching of his own fists until he turned to stare beyond the windows, where rain seethed through the slats and filled tiny rivers in the gaps of the floor. Morning was far off.</p><p>The stamping of his staff and the ensuing pitter of dust as it fell from the old wood onto the dais below regained his attention. “You remember what we agreed, Avatar, don’t you?”</p><p>“No bending,” Aang was still staring out of the window, past the invading cascades of rain at the ever-lengthening night. “I remember.”</p><p>The men in the arcades stood from their kneeling positions in unison and stepped closer to the edge of the mat. Aang had not counted until then. There were two-dozen. “I must say,” Gato said, “I’m surprised you showed.”</p><p>Surprised he had showed himself so easily, perhaps, but otherwise, Aang knew that was a lie. It was not his heartbeat that gave him away. Not directly, at least. From on high, standing on old wood where Aang’s seismic sense was dulled, it was only a hazy thump. No, it was his breathing that Aang heard, deliberate and controlled. It was the very oxygen in his blood, coursing faster and faster as his heart raced to match. His heart was beating, alright, and Aang did not have to hear it to know that it beat like a liar’s.</p><p>“I didn’t want it to come to this,” Aang said, more for the sake of the men Gato was about to send at him. “You know that. We can still resolve this without violence. Tell me where they are and we’ll end this peacefully.”</p><p>What came next was some diatribe about selfishness and morality that Aang barely paid attention to. His thoughts were elsewhere. On Katara and Sokka and Toph. On hope. He and Gato exchanged some more banalities, some vacuous banter that began to test Aang’s patience until Gato motioned for his men to move.</p><p>They circled Aang. He breathed in. He breathed out.</p><p>Gato thumped the staff again. “Begin.”</p><p>The first hit came from the right, a leaping kick. Aang caught it, shoved up and the man’s shoulders hit the mat hard. A fist came from the left and he leapt aside, catching the attacker’s wrist and delivering a savage kick to his knee before wrenching his arm down and twisting to send him spinning to the floor. The others rushed him at once; he ducked a kick, pirouetted away, blocked one punch and dodged another, shunted and retreated again, trying to distance himself from the center of the group where they could pile on him and end the fight in seconds. Two more converged on him. He caught a swing, buried his elbow in the attacker’s ribs, deflected a kick from the second with one of his own and kicked the man’s other leg, brought his knee back and crushed it into the side of the first attacker. Both of them fell away.</p><p>The rest descended on him. He flanked them, keeping to the periphery of the room, a wall always behind him, and led them onto the rain-slicked floors of the arcade. One rushed—Aang ducked low, slammed his fists into the side of one knee then the next, brought the heel of his palm up into the man’s groin, leapt high and swung out a vicious kick that sent the man crashing through the window slats and into the flooded gutters outside. More came, always more, some downwind through the arcade and others trying to flank him from the mat to his right. Aang blew a chunk out of one of the pillars with his heel, casting a cloud of dust and splinters into the air to stun the man leading the direct charge before ducking to the right, between the pillars and sweeping a leg with his forearm as he flowed beneath a kick. He leapt up and braced himself between the pillars, a palm to one and a foot to the other, and dug his heel into the nose of one man, the forehead of another, kicked away a grab and brought both legs onto a third man’s shoulders then lurched down, slamming him onto the floor with an echoing thud before rolling away to the mat’s center.</p><p>The men seized weapons from the racks—guandao, jian, spears, hook swords, dao—and circled him again. Trepidation stalled their steps, now. Before they had been confident, sure of themselves. Now they needed weapons to bolster their resolve. Eight were down. Sixteen remained.</p><p>Again. The blade of a dao whined as it sliced through the air. Aang leaned away, sidestepped the follow-up, caught his wrist and knocked the weapon from his hand, leapt over his shoulder and snapped the man’s arm over his knee as he landed. He left him there screaming as another pair of assailants wielding jian rushed him, and he rushed to meet them. He arched backwards beneath a thrust, casting off his robes and wrapping them around the swordsman’s arm as he snapped back upright, and the second came in with a downward swing. Aang tucked himself against the man whose arm was still bound by the taut cloth of his robes, digging his shoulder into the center of his face as he did, halted a swipe from the second man before trapping his arm with the rest of the slack. Aang’s leg snapped straight behind him, his heel finding purchase in someone’s sternum, and he leapt high to kick off the men whose arms he had tied together, rolling off his shoulders and narrowly avoiding the broad blade of a guandao. He stomped hard, pinning the polearm back against the floor as its wielder tried to raise it and snapping the head from the haft. He relieved him of the glaive-turned-staff with a twist and a punch directed at his center of mass, crushing the air from his lungs and sending him across the mat in a crumpled heap.</p><p>Hook swords came cycling through the air next, keening and silver in the scant moonlight. Aang batted them away with his impromptu staff, swept low to catch the attacker’s legs but the man hopped over and wheeled the swords overhead; Aang brought the staff up across himself and stopped the blades short of splitting his collarbones but his attacker hauled them back, carving slits into the wood of the staff and Aang grit his teeth as he felt the tips of the hooks dig into his shoulders from behind. He spun, ignored the searing pain as the steel tore ribbons of skin from his back, ducked beneath his staff and shoved hard so the swords flew from their wielder’s hands, clattering against the railing of the dais. Aang felt the dull thumps of cracking ribs shudder up the staff on the follow-through and he pirouetted, twirling his weapon in a vicious arc to create distance. Ten remained.</p><p>Then a shift in the air behind him. Aang turned, and brought his staff up only in enough time to slow a blow that would have otherwise pulverized bone. His weapon snapped in two, broken down the middle and the head of his own staff—the glider, the one stolen by Gato—slammed across his chest, throwing him nearly half the distance of the mat, his shoulders burning as he drifted to a stop, the pain from the wounds inflicted by the hook swords screaming down his back and chest.</p><p>He looked up. Gato had entered the fray. “Back away!” he shouted to his men, fury flashing in his wild eyes. “I’ll handle this myself.”</p><p>They heeded, retreating once more into the arcades, this time their breath heaving and uneasy. Gato stood the staff on its end and shed his jacket, revealing a body which had been belied by loose-fitting clothes—racked with hard muscle.</p><p>Without another word, Gato took the staff, twirled it about his body, and settled into a stance.</p><p>Aang narrowed his eyes and rose to meet him, casting the halves of his weapon aside. His shoulders seared with pain, pain that he ignored. “Just to be clear, since you called your guys off, you’ll still tell me where my friends are if I beat you, right?”</p><p>Gato charged, spinning as he closed the distance, leaping to bring the staff arcing down hard. Aang sidestepped, dropped below the follow-up and swept with his arms but Gato hopped behind him, spun and countered; Aang dodged, dodged again, a third time, until Gato jabbed the staff at him and he seized one end as he leapt back, his weight yanking Gato forward.</p><p>They fought for control of the staff. Gato threw a hook, an elbow, Aang blocked both, switched hands on the staff, threw jabs of his own, punctuated a spin down the length of the weapon with an elbow, Gato leaned away and pulled hard but Aang leapt over his head, landing behind him but Gato had rotated and kept his grip. Aang kicked at his knee and dropped him, Gato came right back up with an uppercut, Aang leaned away and spun the staff. Gato cartwheeled to keep his hold and as he landed, put the momentum in to a hook that caught Aang broadside and knocked him away. Stars crossed his vision, and all that brought him back was his heightened adrenaline and Gato’s bellowing warcry, swinging the staff in a full arc. Aang arched backwards, bracing himself with a palm flat against the floor, and the staff smashed a splintered crater into one of the pillars.</p><p>He didn’t waste time—he pushed himself back to his feet and pressed a hand against the staff to keep it lodged in the pillar. Gato kicked straight out from the hip. Aang hooked a leg down over the kick, disabled it, spinning Gato to a knee, then dug his heel between his shoulder blades, kicking him free of the staff and down against the mat. Aang wrenched his staff out of the pillar, and its familiar weight in his hands was a welcome sensation.</p><p>Though he had not the time to relish in it. Gato pulled a pair of karambits from a sheathe at his back and charged.</p><p>Aang jabbed him in the chest with the staff, spun and jabbed again but Gato redirected and closed in, the one of curved blades nearly tearing Aang’s throat out while the other sliced low, slashing across his ribs. He hissed through his teeth and shoved Gato away, swinging as he did but only knocking a chunk out of one of the pillars. Gato came back and was a whirl of blades. The karambits sang around Aang’s head, turned the air around him to knives, each dodge narrower than the last until he gutchecked Gato with the staff, brought it up under his jaw, half-spun away and caught him above the ear. As he sprawled on the mat, dazed, Aang swung down hard right at his wrist, and as he cartwheeled over the staff he felt the crunch of bone and the keening of anguished screams.</p><p>He planted one foot on Gato’s other arm, pinning the remaining karambit to the floor, and the speared the end of the staff below his chin.</p><p>The room fell still. The sound of rain pattering against the walls returned. It was over.</p><p>“It’s done, Gato,” Aang pressed the staff further into his jaw. He waited a moment to let that statement hang in the air. “Tell me where they are.”</p><p>“It’s never over,” Gato spat. “Not until every last one of you fucking creatures is wiped from the earth!”</p><p>“Well, that’s not gonna happen for a while and I’m not willing to wait that long, so tell me where my friends are. I won’t ask again.”</p><p>“Or what?” Gato’s smile blended into a grimace. He howled through clenched teeth, a string of saliva slinging over his lip. “Or what?!”</p><p>Aang did not have to answer, as a commotion sounded from outside. Screams of the guards muffled by the walls and the rain. Dull thumps that sent shivers through the floor. The crunch of rock. Earthbending.</p><p>The doors burst open. In their absence stood Toph.</p><p>“We can’t leave you alone for a minute, can we?”</p><p>“Toph!” Aang made a conscious effort not to shift his weight from Gato. “You guys made it!”</p><p>Satoru leaned into view and waved. “I’m here too!”</p><p>“Just us right now,” she said to Aang, “queenie and meathead are holding off a riot. We gotta go!” Toph narrowed her eyes. “Wait, who are these clowns?”</p><p>As if by insulted response, one of Gato’s men swung from behind, and the room erupted again. Aang flicked the staff behind him to keep the dao from severing his head from his shoulders, spun and swung hard. The man flew from the mat into one of the mulched pillars, bending it under the impact. Toph had run in and was dispatching the others, bending their weapons from their hands.</p><p>Gato seized the confusion. He rose, dragging a karambit across Aang’s leg and thrust back to bury it in the base of his skull as he dropped. Aang batted it away, swept him as he spun back to his feet and hit him center-of-mass before he hit the ground, airbending the strike this time and launching him across the room. Aang made to give chase but the wound on his leg halted him long enough for Gato to rip the slats from a nearby window and crawl outside.</p><p>It was chaos. Guards flooded the training hall, bolstering the remainders of Gato’s men, or otherwise replacing them as they slinked out of the room to retreat with their master. Toph punched someone’s head through one of the pillars and ripped a score of blades from the surrounding men’s hands, turning them into a whirling cloud of scythes. “Was that Gato?!”</p><p>“Long story, tell you later!”</p><p>“Get after him!”</p><p>“No!” Aang forced himself to his feet. He pulled water in through the windows and blasted the torrents at the guards, washing them against the walls. “I know exactly where he’s going.”</p><p>That was met without argument. They bolted for the doors, and Aang didn’t resist pulling Toph into an embrace when they reached the rain-slicked stone outside, pitted and malformed by her earthbending. “You’re okay,” he said, more to himself than anyone.</p><p>She patted his back but pushed away. “Save it for later. The whole city’s in a tizzy!”</p><p>The haunting sensation of finality returned, this time impelled by the distant orange splashes on the clouds in the black sky. Aang recognized the familiar ominous glow of fire on the clouds, pooling in an inverted ocean of flamelight. If he listened closely enough, he could hear screams. His heart dropped into his stomach. “It’s already started…”</p><p>“Which is why we need to go. Satoru!”</p><p>A hand shot up from behind a large chunk of rock that had been thrown against the base of the surrounding slope, smashing the already-spilling retaining wall. “Over here,” he called.</p><p>“Time to go,” Toph turned back to Aang. “You look like shit. You gonna be okay?”</p><p>He tested his leg and fire filled his veins, but it was at least a distraction from the cut across his ribs and the twin wounds in his shoulders. “I’ll have to be. Let’s move.”</p><p>Together, they turned the stone streets into a rolling carpet, propelling the three of them through rain and moonlit darkness towards their destination. Cold wind and hammering rain beat on Aang’s face as they surged out of the choked streets of Old Town into the city proper, the glow from the fires growing more intense and the din of pandemonium swelling in the air. “What happened in Ba Sing Se?” Aang asked.</p><p>“We found out what the Council’s planning. All the remaining Fire Nation colonies, the ones left after the Harmony Restoration Movement kicked the bucket, are banding together to form a Fifth Nation. Completely benderless. All of them have been upping their police forces just like we’ve seen here—it’ll be an army by the time they’re done.”</p><p>“And the Business Council will have control of it.” Aang shook his head. “This is really bad.”</p><p>“Which is why we told Kuei and Zuko. Once they get here, the Business Council is done for.”</p><p>That was good, Aang thought, though he could not feel any relief. Not yet. Right now, the long term was not doing anything to keep the people rioting in the streets from danger. They took corners at a drift, Satoru yelping as he bounced on the mound of rolling stone, and launched onto a main thoroughfare.</p><p>Chaos. Police forces filled across the street at both ends trying to corral the seething crowd of civilians in the center. Some of the people held sheets of rock over their heads to shield themselves from the rain, others bent it away from themselves and their families in a dome, others threw lobs of it at the police. Benders. From their elevated position on the stone, Aang spotted Sokka in the middle of the crowd, towering with his sword in-hand and directing people down the street. A squad came through an alley behind him to try and quell the crowd, either through captures or killings but Sokka prevented both, forcing them into the bottleneck and bellowing a challenge, his size alone enough to give them pause. A wall of ice at one end of the street kept a battalion of guards at bay—Katara.</p><p>War. It was a war. People bleeding from the head were held up by their neighbours, some struggling on their feet and others not moving at all. Children clung to their parents, confused and terrified. The police lobbed firebombs into the crowd, and if there had not been firebenders present to gather the flames and dissipate them in the sky, the police would have been burning people alive.</p><p>It wasn’t even a mass arrest. It was a purge.</p><p>As Aang watched the chaos, memories echoed in his mind. He remembered Sokka and Toph retching their lungs out on a bloodstained dirt road; remembered the unshed tears in Katara’s eyes as she had been forced to endure the mortifying ordeal of an art she wished she had never learned; Lao Beifong smothering his love for his own daughter in favour of bigotry and greed; the pallid fear on Satoru’s face, at once racing and stagnant with all the possibilities of how he would die; the tower, the beatings, the butchering, the lightning, the attempted weaponization of his anguish; Kayra, and Sanjuro, and little Yoshie, and two guards harassing the owner of a fruit stall. There was no anger in their memory, then. Merely certainty.</p><p>“Now would be a really good time for you to start glowing,” Toph shouted to him over the clamour.</p><p>“You read my mind.” Bringing his fists together, he breathed serenity into his mind. Infinity wheeled around him, the yawning cosmos. All the world fell silent.</p><p>His tattoos flashed. It ended tonight.</p><p>Aang rose into the sky, a sphere of tempestuous air ribboned by water and earth and fire surrounding him. Steadily, the noise of the riot dwindled into nothingness as they watched his ascension, and out of the silence he heard Sokka’s distant voice, the smile in it. “Woohoo! What do you got now?! Everyone talks a big game until the tattoos start glowing!”</p><p>The city sprawled below him. He spoke in a thousand voices.</p><p>“Officers of Cranefish City.” The words were omnipresent, booming across the sky. “You have sown untold chaos and misery among your people at the behest of greedy and pernicious men. Your leaders ask you to drive innocent people from their homes while allowing those who stoke the fires of hatred to persist unchallenged, and instead of rebelling against these evils, you perpetuate them. The laws you uphold are unjust, the ways you uphold them cruel and excessive. It will not continue.”</p><p>Aang raised his hands, and at both ends of the street, bulwarks erupted from the ground. Sheer stone walls that sprouted around the guards and shut them inside, and at once the fighting stopped. He soared over the city, finding each cell, each conflict Gato and the Council’s wickedness had spawned, and did the same, erecting enclosures around the city guard forces. It was not a long-term solution, nor was it meant to be, but it was enough to halt the killing. It took only minutes.</p><p>Fires still raged across the city, their livid orange glows dotting the cityscape in roiling wells. Aang swirled his arms overhead and the flames siphoned away, curling towards him and one another, collecting to form tendrils in the sky and he breathed deep, taking the fire into himself. Flames filled his chest, his lungs a cauldron, and he exhaled a draconic gout of fire into the air, a maelstrom that scorched a hole in the heavy clouds. The storm irised open, widening from the center as he bent the clouds apart, pushing the curtain of rainfall past the perimeter of the city.</p><p>There he hung, suspended in windless, rainless air, and the city below him was reverently silent. It was over.</p><p>“Return to your homes, people of Cranefish City,” he spoke, “and see to your wounded. You will have our help. Your fight is over.”</p><p>That did not feel true, he thought as he descended, the elements around him dissipating, but it felt like the right thing to say. Their fight was far from over. But the long night was at an end.</p><p>Below him, the crowd gyred apart to give him space. Cheers erupted as his feet touched the flagstones. He smiled diplomatically, but searched the crowd for his friends.</p><p>They came to him. Sokka barged passed people to reach him first, shouting his name and embracing him at a run. “Oh man, I missed you, brother! You were on fire! That Avatar State stuff never gets old!”</p><p>Toph came next. “See? Now we can hug.” Aang and Sokka opened their arms to welcome her in. “Good to see you, twinkletoes. The other two were real worried, but I knew you’d be fine.”</p><p>“Toph,” Aang laughed, “I may not be as good at is as you are, but you know I can also tell when people are lying, right?”</p><p>She blushed, but smiled despite it, slugging him in the shoulder and returning to their embrace.</p><p>Then the crowd fell silent. As the three of them parted, Aang looked around in a sudden hurry, eyes darting until Sokka, lips parted in a crooked smile, tapped him on the shoulder and pointed with his chin. Aang turned.</p><p>Katara.</p><p>His breath caught at the sight of her. Just like it always did.</p><p>They did not wait. They ran to one another, and collided.</p><p>The exhaustion in his body fled, scattered under the warmth of hers. Her hand on the back of his neck sent sparks down his spine. She held him tight, tight enough that his wounds were screaming in response and he didn’t care, didn’t dare mention it for fear that she would stop. He pulled her in close, flush against him, and breathed deep. Cinnamon. He smiled in her hair and did not let the tears on his face pull him away from her. “They kept telling me you were dead.” The words came past stifled sobs. “That the Dai Li had gotten you guys. I didn’t believe them, or I tried not to, but—I didn’t let myself think about it, but I was terrified…”</p><p>Somehow, she held him tighter, and he felt tears on his chest. “I know. What we saw as we were coming in… It was chaos. We were so scared that something had happened to you. I was so scared.”</p><p>They parted, only for a moment, only enough to close the distance again with a kiss. Clumsier than they were accustomed to, Aang thought, and what a gift that was. Cranefish, the Council, the uncountable eyes that bore them witness, and all the world streamed around their feet, melted away, the troubles of it all far away and not so important, then. Not so important at all in the eternity of that unbroken embrace.</p><p>She pulled away, and it was all he could do not to chase her on the way down. “What happened?” Her eyes shimmered as she looked over the mottled purples and yellows, the savage cuts and bruises on his body. “Oh, Aang, what did they do to you?”</p><p>Unthinkable things. “Nothing permanent,” he smiled, but it faded quickly. “It’s Gato. He’s behind all of it.”</p><p>“Can’t say I’m surprised.” Her brow furrowed as she caught sight of one of the wanted posters bearing Aang’s face. “We thought it might have been him. Never did trust that guy.”</p><p>“I know where he’s going.” All too well. “We can worry about him later, though. Right now, we have to see to these people.”</p><p>He saw that look of cold determination cross her face. How he had missed her. He kissed her again before turning to the crowd. “Are there any healers here?”</p><p>The first to throw her hand up was a woman near the edge of the crowd. She pressed to the front, a man behind her and a young girl riding his shoulders. Aang recognized them at once. The girl scrambled down from her father’s shoulders and ran, shouting Aang’s name with her arms fanning over her head. He knelt to her height and opened his arms, and she nearly knocked him off-balance, her little arms wrapping around his neck. “You came back! Just like you promised!”</p><p>“Just like I promised.”</p><p>“Why are you crying? Are you sad?”</p><p>“Not at all, Yoshie. Not at all.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Aang, Katara, Sokka and Toph see to the wounded in the aftermath of Gato's failed plot; some old friends arrive, one of which helps Sokka confront his feelings for Toph.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Get those doors open!”</p><p>Aang was not sure who had said it. The wounded swarmed the streets, and he had to set Appa down half a block ahead of the bloodied, clamouring procession of people to give him enough room to safely land. As he hopped down from the saddle, he forced himself not to linger on having to cushion the short, familiar fall with a current of air just to keep knives from clacking against the inside of his skin, or throbs of pain pulsing through the bruises on his body.</p><p>He approached the teeming crowd at a jog. Sokka stood on a bench at the curb, the added height giving him the visibility he needed to direct the crowd toward the Council Hall down the road, and cupped his hands around his mouth when he spotted Aang. “Those healers make it downtown alright?”</p><p>“Appa and I got them there ourselves!” Aang shouted back. “Is Toph back yet?”</p><p>“Not yet!” Sokka scanned the sea of heads below him for a moment. “Katara’s in the crowd somewhere!”</p><p>Aang nodded and began to shoulder through the crowd in search of her. People were gracious enough to try and give him what little space they could, nervous eyes flicking up and down his wounded body, but in the density of the crowd, they were short any space to give. Any waterbender with the ability to heal was mending injuries mid-stride. Morning approached, the city awash in a cool blue, and as Aang drew closer to Katara, or at least to where he thought she was, he could have sworn that the ache in his body grew more intense. A sign, and a familiar one at that, that he was pushing himself. But he knew that already.</p><p>Katara, too, but he had managed to convince her that they could worry about it once they had gotten the others to the Council Hall, though that did not stop the worried, almost chiding looks as he approached. “How are we looking?” he asked her.</p><p>Her hands were preoccupied with a wound on a man’s shoulder, reddened from his neck to his elbow by blood, but she handed him off to Kayra, who had been close at her side since they had gotten on the move. Satoru, his hair mussed and glasses askew, held the men up by his other arm. Aang nodded at them both.</p><p>Katara flicked blood from the water that gloved her hands and funneled it back into the skin at her side. Concern marked her face. “Better than you.”</p><p>He shrugged, and suppressed a wince with a smile. “You should see the other guy.”</p><p>“It’s worse than I thought,” she tried to laugh. “You’re starting to sound like Toph. Is she back?”</p><p>“No, not yet.” He and Toph had been ferrying handfuls of healers all over the city to pockets of wounded civilians, he on the back of Appa and she in a bowl of rock held over her head. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”</p><p>“Whether she’s here or not, we have to get the Council Hall open and cleared out.”</p><p>“On it.” Aang hurried forward, purpose driving his strides.</p><p>Katara snatched his elbow before it could drive them any further, her grip at once firm enough to stop him and gentle enough not to rouse any pain in his arm, and she pulled them aside one another again as they kept forward with the crowd. “You’re pushing yourself too hard. You haven’t slept in days.”</p><p>With all that had been going on, that had scarcely occurred to Aang, and as if she had spoken it into being, he was suddenly acutely aware of the exhaustion that gripped him. He stuffed it away, resolving to sleep later, always later, and in his sudden weariess he thought for a moment that he could conceal the fatigue weighing against his eyes. Nothing got past her. “I promise, once we get things set up in the Council Hall, I’ll take a break.” He smiled. “Don’t think you’re off the hook, either. You need it more than anyone.”</p><p>“Do as I say, not as I do.”</p><p>“Now you’re starting to sound like Toph.”</p><p>A kiss at the pace they were walking was difficult, but they managed it. Maybe it was the pressure of the last few days finally crashing on him, or that he had barely gotten a wink of sleep since they had arrived in Cranefish City, or that the thoughts he’d had atop Gato’s tower had made themselves known again and been clawing for precedence ever since he had reunited with Katara, but as they parted, the absence of her hand in his own, her side against his, was greater than any of the wounds he was currently ignoring. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to turn on his heel, part the crowd, and take Katara somewhere they could simply, quietly be.</p><p>As always, there would be time for that later. He waved Sokka down, and they moved for the Council Hall. Being that it was the nearest building big enough to accommodate the numbers, pragmatism dictated that it was the most sensible place to convert into a field hospital. There was, of course, an undeniable irony to it, but that was more a matter of coincidence than necessity. Still, Aang took as much pleasure in it as the circumstances would allow.</p><p>Sokka jogged ahead and tried to shoulder the doors open to no avail. “They’re locked up tight.”</p><p>Aang waved him aside and primed his staff across his shoulders, bowing it with the tension. He hopped forward, spun, and swung it in an upwards arc, a swath of air slicing from its end along the tall seam between the doors. They burst open, and at first he thought nothing of the smell. “I wonder where the Councillors were during all this,” he said as he jogged back to Sokka’s side.</p><p>“Probably nice and cozy in their compounds.” They moved to enter the Hall. “Once we move the tables to clear out some room, start pulling down the curtains and tapestries. We’ll use ‘em as bedrolls.”</p><p>He started saying something else, but as they passed through the atrium and into the debate chamber, his orders stopped as cold as they did. “Oh, man…”</p><p>The Councillors had not been in their houses at all. In fact, they were right there in the Council Hall, their mangled bodies strewn about the chamber.</p><p>Blood smeared the walls in sickly sanguine streaks, its pungent, metallic stench blotting the air. Bodies lay splayed on halves of broken tables, in pools of barely-dried blood, amidst tatters of cloth and splintered chunks of broken furniture. Aang’s eyes followed a torrent of arterial spray to a body whose face was frozen in silent agony, eyes wide and unblinking, its mouth a yawning rictus of vacant pain.</p><p>They had been massacred. Bloody rives curved into their bodies, skin and muscle cleaved open to the bone. One man’s arm was peeling away from his torso, clinging by sinewy threads. Blade wounds. Clearly, the Councillors had resisted as best they could, but in vain. They hadn’t stood a chance.</p><p>“Toph isn’t back yet.” Sokka’s voice was little more than a breath.</p><p>Aang caught his meaning immediately. He started scanning the bodies.</p><p>They picked their way among the destruction as carefully and respectfully as they could, trying not to gag at the smell of blood and bile wafting in a necrotic aggregate, and Aang froze before his heel could hit the floor again when he heard ragged breathing. “Sokka! Over here!”</p><p>Pained whispers guided the two of them to the base of a pillar on the left side of the chamber, on the fringes of the carnage in the room’s centre. What at first looked like a corpse tilted its head to face them, and Lao Beifong stared up at them with sunken eyes in a colourless face. Dried blood crusted the flowered edges of a channel through the right side of his abdomen. “My daughter,” he said. “My daughter. Where is she?”</p><p>“She’s on her way right now,” Aang said, unsure if Toph would even want him to comfort her father with the thought of her at all. He looked over his shoulder at Sokka. “Get Katara.”</p><p>Sokka nodded and flung from the Council Hall, shouting her name as he reached the atrium.</p><p>“Gato.” Lao spoke again. “It was Councilman Gato. He called,” he paused as a shudder of pain smothered the words, “called an emergency meeting last night. Demanded we all be here. Once we were all present, the guards started… Started slaughtering us.”</p><p>“You were planning to join the remaining colonies together,” Aang said. Not an accusation, merely a statement. He wanted to hear it from Lao himself.</p><p>Lao obliged. “We were. Though I suppose Gato had it in mind that he would be the only one to see that to its end.” Tears rimmed his eyes. “What a fool I was. Once he’d learned that Satoru had helped you into my office, he tasked me with killing him. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not after… Not after what Toph said.”</p><p>So that was why Aang had found Satoru unharmed at Earthen Fire. At the time, it struck him as cosmically lucky, but he had been happy enough to find him alive that he had not questioned it. Instead of asking Lao if he would have gone through with it had Toph not fallen out with him, Aang let him continue.</p><p>“I betrayed my daughter. I’m a monster, Avatar Aang.”</p><p>Aang felt compelled to say something, and to agree. “It isn’t my place to say, Councilman.”</p><p>Lao managed a laugh. “Then who else?”</p><p>Footsteps pounded behind him. Aang turned to see Sokka returning with Katara in tow. She took Lao’s side without a word to begin treating his injury.</p><p>Satoru, too, had come. Unlike Katara, who leapt to action as she always did, he froze at the sight of Lao dying at his feet, and with good reason. For all his faults, Aang supposed that Lao had always at least done right by Satoru. Seeing him in such a state could not have been easy. Satoru sat opposite Katara, taking Lao’s hand into his own.</p><p>“Satoru, my boy,” Lao said, eyes lilting.</p><p>“I’m here, Mister Beifong.”</p><p>“I’m on my deathbed,” he laughed. “You can call me by my first name.”</p><p>“Nonsense!” Satoru’s eyes glistened, mirroring those of the dying man whose hand rested in his. He looked at Katara. “It is nonsense, right?”</p><p>“I don’t know,” was all she said. Simple, blunt, and necessary.</p><p>Knowing what he knew, what they all knew, sympathy came a little less readily than it usually did, but that did not mean Aang felt inclined to simply consign Lao to his demise. Confirming with Katara that she had him stable, he stood and was ready to start clearing the chamber when he spotted Toph frozen in the threshold of the atrium.</p><p>Silence. She neither moved nor spoke. Surely, she sensed the bodies, the empty husks around the room, and wondered if her father was among them. Aang’s stomach pitted at the thought of it.</p><p>Sokka made sure he reached her first. His hands settled on her shoulders. “Toph…”</p><p>“Is he here?”</p><p>The next voice that spoke her name was Lao’s. In the vast, echoing grave of the Council Hall, it might have been mistaken for a ghost’s. She followed it, Sokka close behind, and as she reached them, Satoru stepped away to let her take his place.</p><p>She did, and Lao held his hand out to her. There was a noticeable hesitation before she took it, like it was perfunctory. Like she did not really want to.</p><p>Aang watched as words failed him, mouth fluttering open in silence. Lao’s face glistened with tears he could no longer hold at bay. “I don’t even know what to say,” eventually came out. “No apology will never be enough.”</p><p>If Toph agreed with that, and Aang suspected she did, she made no indication of it. Her face betrayed nothing. She was as her element—stoic and firm.</p><p>“He’ll make it,” Katara marked an end to their bitter reunion, the same stone of which Toph was cut replicated in the professionalism of her voice, “but we need to get this place prepped for the others. Someone help me get him up.”</p><p>Satoru hopped to it before Aang could, Toph quietly backing away to give him the space he needed to help his boss to his feet. Lao let out a strangled gasp as he stood. Even with the help of Katara and Satoru at his side, the pain he was in was evident. They saw him to another room, the eastern wing, leaving Aang, Sokka and Toph in silence. “He’s right,” she said suddenly.</p><p>Aang and Sokka turned at once. “About what?” asked the latter.</p><p>“About sorry never being enough.”</p><p>Sokka took her hand. Still her face was unreadable, expressionless, but there seemed to be a momentary softness in it, fleeting but there, and Aang saw her squeeze back. Perhaps it was thankfulness for her friends’ silence in letting her continue as she needed. Perhaps thankfulness for the hand she held. “I’m not really sure what I feel.” Her voice was conversational, banal. “Nothing, I guess. Don’t really know what that means.”</p><p>“You don’t need to,” Sokka said. “Not right now, at least.”</p><p>“No. No, I guess I don’t.”</p><p>Aang gave her shoulder a companionable shake, doing them the courtesy of not making any indication that he had noticed the rhythmic circles she was rubbing on the back of Sokka’s hand with her thumb, and set about readying the chamber. If they had the time, he would have preferred to relocate entirely, thinking it perverse to bring a wounded horde into a room covered in blood and reeking of bodies, but as was the case throughout all of he and his friend’s lives, time was seldom on their side.</p><p>He made short work of the furniture, even shorter once Sokka and Toph joined his efforts. The problem was the corpses, which Aang was not about to be so unceremonious as to even think about moving with airbending. Toph saved him the trouble, erecting around them simple sarcophagi and carefully, respectfully pushing them to the chamber’s edges, where they would remain entombed for the time being.</p><p>People started to filter in, directed indoors by Sokka, who had moved to the street outside, and they eyed nervously the blood about the room. Katara would later draw moisture out of the air to wash out the stains, but Aang could not but regret that he had not been able to cleanse the grisliness before people had entered. The last thing they needed was a reminder of all they had endured clinging to the walls of their refuge.</p><p>As per Sokka’s instructions, Aang tried to pull a tapestry from the wall, artistic sacrilege be damned. A band of fire radiated across his shoulders, the holes dug into them by the hook swords in his fight with Gato and his men once again making themselves painfully apparent, and he collapsed to a knee. The gilded rod from which the tapestry hung rattled louly enough to draw attention to him from all across the Council Hall. He was too weak to pull it free, he realized and subsequently denied. Favouring the leg across which a karambit had left an angry tear, he stood, and a hand came to clasp his and help him the rest of the way up. “Aang, man,” Sokka said, “you gotta get yourself seen to.”</p><p>“Later. I need to help—”</p><p>“You’ve done plenty. Toph and I can handle this. Don’t make me get Katara.”</p><p>He remembered his promise to her, then, and exhaled a laugh. That settled it, he supposed. With a nod, he acquiesced, and parted ways with Sokka. Eyes tracked him as he crossed the chamber. One such gaze was Kayra’s, with whom he shared a simple nod before the two of them carried on with their respective pursuits. He wondered where Yoshie was, neither wishing she were here nor that she was back home, but resolved to trust her parents’ judgement in doing the right thing. In the short time he had known them, they always had.</p><p>He wandered a short while. Behind the platform that hosted the lectern, where a speaker would stand during Council meetings, was a staircase in the back wall. He ascended it, thankful that his glider staff could act in place of his wounded leg, and at its top found a lounge where the Councillors would retreat during recesses. Katara was likely still busy with Lao, and with healing abilities as practiced as hers, he did not want to steal her away from the rest of the wounded once she was finished, so he resolved to finding what respite he could—a prospect that, the more he considered it, the more he welcomed it.</p><p>The building’s stone walls muted well the half-hearted murmur of the crowd below him, only distantly audible from the peak of the staircase. Silk-cushioned couches sat on either side of an ornately carved table a few paces from the lounge’s entrance. He crawled onto one, letting his staff clatter to the floor where it may, and the green silk was cool on his skin. He was unconscious as soon as his head hit the cushion.</p><p>The coolness of the silk turned to rain, the lounge to a high place. Gato’s tower. Lightning ripped across the sky, its ragged edges furrowing the clouds. The valley below was barren and desolate, now, the trees like grinded teeth. Aang could not see over the tower’s edge, could not move at all, but he could sense it, the ossified, dead earth as the thunder overhead shattered through its hollowed remnants and shuddered up the tower to his eyes. The air around him was hard, a chrysalis of bone. Lightning struck again and each peal of thunder was a scream.</p><p>The bolts. He watched them draw closer. Each one speared nearer than the last, inching towards him like the bright shadow of a celestial sundial, death approaching in blinding snapshots. The thunder, the screams that shook the sky grew louder, louder, louder still until he felt the vibrations of their keening reports in his eyes. With each strike, his tattoos flared in response, growing in intensity as the storm did. The Avatar State, the lightning that would cook the life from him—he was powerless to stop either from coming.</p><p>Rain soaked him to the bone. Pain pulsed in the wounds across his body, the twin punctures in his shoulders, the crescent of frayed skin on his ribs, the gash on his leg, all linchpinned by the puckered pit of scar tissue in the centre of his back, each wound threaded together by humming tendons. His tattoos alighted, the final bolt came, and the scream that followed it was finally his own.</p><p>“Aang!”</p><p>He was back in the lounge, the last echo of his sleep-induced scream rolling off the walls. White-blue light, livid and lingering, was replaced by the soothing hues of Katara’s eyes.</p><p>He did not keep either the relief or the shame out of his voice. “I’m sorry, Katara, I—”</p><p>“Aang.”</p><p>“I didn’t mean to—”</p><p>“Aang!” She held his face. “Stay still!”</p><p>Before he could respond, the reason for her interjections became clear, spreading over his side. The cut on his ribs there, one of Gato’s more material mementos, had reopened as he launched and twisted awake, Katara’s work undone and the green silk browned by blotches of blood.</p><p>She pressed her hand to his forehead and gently urged him onto his back. “Lay back down,” her voice was a welcome reprieve. “Everything’s okay.”</p><p>Silence fell over them as she retreated the injury. The pain in his leg was gone, he had just then noticed, as was the band of it across his shoulders. Katara had been fast at work.  “Bad dream, huh?” she asked.</p><p>He hummed acknowledgement. “How long was I asleep?”</p><p>“Nearly sixteen hours. You were knocked right out.”</p><p>That shocked him. It did not feel as though he had been asleep even a third of that time, and it was then he noticed the dark circles under Katara’s own eyes, for which he was struck by a pang of guilt.</p><p>“Everything’s fine,” she continued, sensing the mounting tension in his body. “You needed the rest, and the others have things under control downstairs.” A small smile adorned her face. Warmth bloomed in his chest at the sight of it. “Gato couldn’t have picked a worse fight.”</p><p>“No,” Aang took her hand. “He couldn’t have.”</p><p>Once she resealed the wound, she sighed, and leaned down to rest her head on his chest. The softness of her hair, her skin, her. “What happened while we were Ba Sing Se?”</p><p>He said nothing, at first.</p><p>“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”</p><p>“He ambushed me as soon as you guys left,” Aang felt suddenly inclined to speak. “Took me to this huge tower northeast of the city, in the mountains, and he kept me there for a couple days. He did the usual—hit me, talked at me—but it didn’t get him anywhere. Then he killed Councillor Manyu right in front of me.”</p><p>Katara’s head lifted from his chest.</p><p>“Well, not Gato himself, but one of his men. Gato left after the first night to come back here and set the rest of his plan in motion. But they just slit Manyu’s throat right there. And there was nothing I could do.”</p><p>“Why? I mean, what was he after?”</p><p>“They wanted to drive me into the Avatar State and kill me. That way, the next Avatar couldn’t come along to mess up his plans.” He shook his head, recalling his dream and the waking nightmare that impelled it. “Then they… the platform I was on started rising, and the ceiling opened and there was this crazy storm outside. Worst storm I’ve ever seen. Lightning everywhere, thunder so loud it sounded like the world was ending, and I was lashed to these metal posts by chains, like a… a living lightning rod. I guess he thought I’d panic and go into the Avatar State, then the lightning would handle the rest.”</p><p>Katara said nothing, her face a silent amalgam of sadness and shock and savage rage.</p><p>“He knew about Azula,” Aang finished. “About our fight. What it did to me.”</p><p>Katara had seen firsthand the scars Azula’s lightning had left him with, the immaterial ones as well as the physical. Sokka and Toph knew as well, and Zuko—not to the same degree Katara did, how intimately it affected him, but they knew because he had told them. His closest confidants, and no one else. So how had Gato known?</p><p>With all that had been going on, it did not occur to Aang, really, until that very moment that Gato knew of this deeply personal thing, this trauma of his. The knowing itself was not surprising; that had been somewhere in the back of Aang’s mind, adumbrated in thought ever since the events at the tower—of course Gato knew of it, for he had tried to weaponize it—but it was the nature of his knowing a thing so private that was cause for alarm. Though, as Aang thought on it, it did not appall him perhaps as much is it should have, for the reality of it was that it was simply an unfortunate by-product of notoriety. Whether he wanted it or not, he was living, breathing history, and his life was chronicled down to the grimmest detail, available to anyone willing to do the digging. And Gato certainly had the resources to dig further than most.</p><p>He stirred from his rumination on the matter as Katara wordlessly settled against him, occupying what little space remained on the couch. Her head came to rest beneath his chin, and for the first time in days, he actually relaxed. “Sleep,” she whispered. “You still need it. I’ll be right here.”</p><p>Always, he thought. As he shut his eyes, coiling his arms around her and pressing a kiss to the top of her head, he did not dare tell her of what he had thought were his final moments that night. How atop Gato’s tower, frozen in fear, he faltered, and thought to comfort himself with the idea that not even death would keep him from finding her again, as if that would somehow be fair to her. It had been a moment of weakness and selfishness.</p><p>He buried that thought in one of the dustier recesses of his mind and drifted to sleep, his breathing falling into the steady rhythm of Katara’s.</p><p>Later. Always later.</p><p> </p><p>It was the middle of the afternoon, two days following the thwarting of the purge, by the time the airships arrived.</p><p>With all the curtains torn from the windows, there was nothing to balk the invading sunlight, nor the shadows that replaced it. Sokka launched from the Hall onto the street outside, knowing the shadows to be a portent of his friend’s arrival for there had not been a cloud in the sky that day, and confirmed it. Overhead, an airship blotted out the sun. Silhouetted as it was, merely a featureless, bulbous shadow, he could not make out the sigil on its side, but the Fire Nation ship descending over the bay to the south determined through simple process of elimination that the one overhead had come from Ba Sing Se. That they were arriving at the same time meant Zuko must have really hauled ass.</p><p>Zuko. A visit with him was long overdue, and the thought of seeing his old friend again, especially after all the adversities of the last week, brought a welcome calmness to Sokka’s mind, and so he rushed back inside to tell the others of his arrival. Toph was making her rounds about the city, penning in any remaining police forces that attempted the streets and tossing food, water and insults as crass as they were creative to the ones still imprisoned, but she undoubtedly heard the airships hovering over the city and would be back soon, so he marched upstairs to find Katara and Aang. Thinking about it then, he had not seen either of them for a while, and dared to think they had actually taken a break for once.</p><p>Those two were running themselves ragged. It made him all the more thankful for Zuko’s swift arrival, for the sooner this whole thing was over, the sooner the pair of them could get some rest. How they kept their heads through it all was a mystery to him. Sokka was no stranger to the stresses of responsibility—none of them were—but he had at least taken a break from solving the world’s problems following the end of the war, downscaled, gone back to the South Pole to help his dad, where things were simpler and the fate of the world didn’t sway in the balance of every decision. What had Aang and Katara done but thrust themselves yet further into the throes political strife and global unrest? He admired them for it, loved them dearly for it. He just wished they would take some time for themselves once in a while.</p><p>Which is why, as he reached the lounge, the sight of the two of them asleep in one another’s arms, their legs a tangle, nearly made him turn on his heels.</p><p>Finally. Finally, after Aang had spent hours on-end neglecting wounds that would have felled anyone lesser, after Katara had spent the past two days holding people together in the wake of a humanitarian crisis, some bliss. What greater injustice was there than waking them now? Sokka leaned against the doorframe, ignoring duty and dreaded necessity for as long as he could and watching them fondly until the sense of voyeurism set in.</p><p>“Katara,” he whispered as he approached, laying a hand on her arm from behind the couch. She mumbled something in response. He gave her a gentle shake. “Katara. Zuko’s here.”</p><p>That was enough to stir her. Still groggy, but alert. “Already? Here-here?”</p><p>“No, not at the Hall,” the weariness on her face that her sleep had done little to abate made him consider, for a moment, going out to meet Zuko himself, “but his airship’s touching down. Saw it over the bay.”</p><p>She nodded at that, and Sokka left the two of them to wake up at their own pace.</p><p>As he moved through the main chamber, informing the healers that he and the others would be stepping out, his eyes wandered to the entrance of the eastern wing of the Council Hall. Inside lay Lao, still recuperating from his injuries.</p><p>Lao. Sokka snarled, relishing the thought of barging in and raking him over the coals. That he was on the brink of death didn’t matter all that much. After how he’d treated Toph, it’s the least of what he deserved. Any condemnation that came his way was well-earned, propriety for his condition be damned. As pleasing as the thought was, it was not his place. No, that belonged to Toph herself.</p><p>Sokka made for the exit, where he met her as she was returning from her rounds, and quite immediately his anger vanished. “We’re being a bit too nice to the guards, if you ask me,” she said.</p><p>“What do you think we should feed them?”</p><p>“Who said anything about feeding them?”</p><p>Sokka laughed and walked past her for the door, nudging for her to follow. “Come on, Zuko’s here.”</p><p>“So those were airships I heard.” The two of them sat at the curb. “What are we waiting for?”</p><p>“Katara and Aang. I found ‘em asleep upstairs, so they’re just getting ready. We’ll all head over together.”</p><p>“So they actually took a break?” Toph flicked away a pebble that had dug into her heel. “Never thought I’d see the day.”</p><p>“Tell me about it. I’m glad, though. Those two push themselves too much.” For once, Sokka felt guilty about the sleep he had stolen over the past week, scant though it was. “How about you? How you been holding up through all this?”</p><p>“Are you kidding?” she scoffed. “This has been a blast. Don’t get me wrong, teaching is fun and all, but nothing beats cracking a few skulls.”</p><p>If she had caught his true meaning, which he suspected she did, she made the choice not to address it, so he didn’t press the matter. “Can’t argue with that.”</p><p>The doors to the Council Hall open and shut behind them, and he turned to see Aang and Katara approaching the street. Selfishly, he reconsidered for just a moment his feelings on Zuko’s haste, thinking it might not have been so bad if he had taken just a little more time if it meant that Aang and Katara could have caught a more substantial break. If it meant some more downtime with Toph. Selfishly again, he lingered on the latter possibility a bit longer, but only until he reached his full height upon standing from the curb.</p><p>Aang retrieved the bison whistle from his pocket, and Appa promptly arrived to ferry them southwest, to the headland where the airships had landed. Seeing the edge of the city slowly creeping onto the promontory as they flew by, Sokka thought it would not be long before the rest of it had been industrialized. His old adage about progress echoed in his mind once again.</p><p>But that was not so important at the moment. Appa landed, and a Fire Lord awaited.</p><p>Sokka cleared the saddle first, and a man clad in dour, gold-rimmed blacks and reds, the hilts of dao swords peering over his shoulders and a scar over his left eye he wore with a little more pride these days, elbowed his way through a retinue of quibbling advisors. He had a tight smile—something Sokka knew to be the sign of unbridled happiness.</p><p>Sokka opened his arms wide. “My man!”</p><p>Zuko closed the distance, and the two hugged. “Sokka. It’s good to see you, buddy.”</p><p>“You too, brother. Been a long time.”</p><p>They held one another at arm’s length. “Too long,” Zuko agreed.</p><p>“Is this really what it takes to get you out of that stuffy old palace and see your friends?” Katara chided as she approached from behind, crossing her arms. “Unearthing conspiracies and overthrowing municipal governments?”</p><p>“You know, what with you being Team Avatar and all,” Zuko snapped back, “I sort of expected you to be a little more appreciative of the responsibilities a leader has to his people.”</p><p>The two glared at one another in silence. Only when the others grew hot enough under the collar for their liking did they drop the charade and embrace, all smiles. “Zuko,” Katara threw her arms around his neck. “It’s so good to see you.”</p><p>“You too, Katara.”</p><p>Aang came next. “Sifu Hotman.”</p><p>Zuko cocked an eyebrow. “…Baldy.”</p><p>Ever the enthusiast, Aang rang with laughter as he lifted him from the ground, armour and all, in a hug tight enough that Zuko coughed out a tuft of flame.</p><p>Toph’s greeting was a simple and wordless one. A handshake no one else knew, a quick embrace, a slug on the shoulder—familiarity.</p><p>“We came as soon as we got Kuei’s letter,” Zuko rolled the arm Toph had struck. “I’m sorry we couldn’t be here sooner. Since this is supposed to be a diplomatic mission, my advisors kept telling me I should come wearing something less,” he gestured to himself, “provocative, but I learned pretty early on that diplomacy and punching things are never mutually exclusive where you guys are concerned. Besides,” he turned to his ship, “they weren’t crazy about me bringing backup, either.”</p><p>Sokka leaned to see around Zuko’s broad shoulders and spotted someone else disembarking the airship who, like Zuko, was better dressed for war than politics. An armoured kimono coloured an earthy green, accented with gold insignia; at her side, a katana, and tucked in the belt from which the scabbard hung, a pair of iron war fans. Beneath a simple ornamental gold headdress was a face painted a stark white, her eyes dashed with sharp streaks of red. Sokka met her gaze, and she beamed. “Suki!”</p><p>“Sokka!” She laughed as he lifted her in a running embrace. “How’ve you been?”</p><p>“Oh, y’know. In trouble.”</p><p>“So nothing’s changed,” she laughed again.</p><p>Admittedly, a part of Sokka missed the familiar closeness. A dangerous thought—he moved to arm’s length, but was no less happy to see her. The others greeted her similarly.</p><p>The six of them, together again against ridiculous odds. Sokka allowed himself a moment of warm reminiscence, and he was sure the others did as well. Just like old times.</p><p>Kuei joined them in short order and they set off through the streets, both leaders’ entourages of advisors trailing close behind them. Aang and Katara explained the situation to Zuko and Kuei, the four of them at the head of the group as they passed the scorched husks of homes and bloodied flagstones, wanted posters demanding Aang’s capture and pens containing the city guard. It was a grim scene, and Zuko was grim because of it.</p><p>“What happened here?” Suki asked. She, Sokka and Toph brought up the rear of the procession. “The whole city looks like a battlefield.”</p><p>“It pretty well is,” Sokka explained. “You should have seen it the other night. Well, no, actually, you shouldn’t have. Nobody should have. The city guard tried to purge it of benders.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“And they would have gotten pretty far with it, too,” Toph pointed her chin at Aang, “if Lightshow hadn’t shown up.”</p><p>“And if you hadn’t gotten him in time,” Sokka nudged her with his elbow. She grunted assent, but he delighted in the small flush of red to her cheeks that failed to hide. “Anyway, the Business Council was behind the whole thing. They’re the ones that militarized the police. I mean, they were talking mechanized vehicles, suped-up armour and weapons, advanced qi-blocking training—”</p><p>“Qi-blocking, huh?”</p><p>Suki’s tone was deadpan, neither solemn nor incensed. Sokka turned to see that her eyes had fallen straight ahead, unblinking, and he remembered then that it had been Suki that trained the first security forces five years ago, following the defeat of Liling’s uprising and her apprehension. “This isn’t your fault, Suki.”</p><p>“Seriously,” Toph agreed, patting the wall of one of the impromptu prisons housing a cluster of guards as they passed it by, “if these clowns had been following your example, none of this would have happened. This is all on them and the dirtbags holding their leashes.”</p><p>“We can hear you,” one of them shouted from inside their cage.</p><p>“That’s why I said it, you gutless fuckbite,” she responded so swiftly and loudly that Sokka jumped. “Lucky for you, we have guests, and I have enough of a sense of propriety not to drag you out here in front of them and feed you the fucking sidewalk.” Toph shifted her foot, and there was a grinding of stone and a muffled thump on the other side of the wall. Sokka wondered if the outburst had more to do with how much she enjoyed unsettling Kuei and Zuko’s snobby advisors, or how much she liked mercilessly belittling the guards, and settled on the resolution that it was probably a healthy balance of both. Either way, she was pleased with herself beyond measure. “Ah, I love doin’ that. Anyway, as I was saying Suki, don’t be so hard on yourself! You got us for that.”</p><p>She made sure to double the height of the walls before moving on, a smile on her face, presumably at the thought of having just caused one mouthy guard to be pummelled by his peers as punishment for worsening their circumstances. The advisors ahead of them parted for her as she approached.</p><p>Sokka watched her go, fully unaware of the absurd grin on his face until Suki was snapping her fingers in front of it. “Sokka. You in there?”</p><p>“Hm?” He blinked. “Oh, sorry. Just zoned out.”</p><p>“Are you… Are you swooning?”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“You and Toph?!”</p><p>“Shh!” He grabbed her shoulders, whisper-shouting. “Shut up!”</p><p>“Sokka, you dog!” Suki playfully punched his arm.</p><p>“No, it isn’t—we’re not—” Sokka dragged a hand over his face to compose himself, falling into step beside her again as if that was at all inconspicuous. “Look, nothing’s happened between us yet, alright?”</p><p>“So you do want something to happen.”</p><p>“Well, yeah. Yes, I do.”</p><p>“So why hasn’t it?”</p><p>A good question. He recalled the night the assassins had attacked, when he and Toph had first seen each other in that startling new light. Recalled, too, a walk on a moonlit street, and a communion. Silver words in his mind. “I guess I don’t know why.”</p><p>He saw her smile from the corner of his eyes, and sensed she was about to confirm the conclusion on whose edge he now danced. “Do you remember Serpent’s Pass?”</p><p>Sokka laughed. It was strange to think fondly of it all. They were a bunch of kids fighting a war, but it was how they all met, after all. A storm they had weathered together. “How could I forget?”</p><p>“Then you remember when Toph went under the water.”</p><p>The reminiscence changed to another kind, then. His eyes sought her in a mild but sudden panic. “I remember.”</p><p>“She never told you about what she said when I brought her up, though.”</p><p>Sokka arched an eyebrow.</p><p>Suki exhaled a laugh. “Your voice, you saying that you were coming to help, was the last thing she heard before she went under. When we surfaced, she thought it was you that grabbed her, not me. So she kissed me.”</p><p>Certainly it was the ill-laid flagstones of Cranefish City’s streets that tripped him up, and not what Suki had said. “What? She did—she did what now?”</p><p>“Just on the cheek. Right here. I thought it was really sweet,” Suki shrugged, “but she swore me to secrecy.”</p><p>Any joy he found in that was fleeting. His heart soared, then sank. “But that was so long ago, now. Just some childhood crush. I’m sure she’s over it by now.”</p><p>“Sokka,” Suki stopped, forcing him to as well, “I love you for it, but you are a fucking dunce.”</p><p>“Hey!”</p><p>“Do you really believe that, or is that you just psyching yourself out? Be honest.”</p><p>So he was. And he found that, no, he did not believe it at all. “No. No, you’re right, the signs have been… The signs have been pretty clear.”</p><p>“Then what are you waiting for?”</p><p>“Because I’m scared to lose her.” He barely recognized his own voice as it spoke the words. “Terrified.”</p><p>“What for?” Suki asked. “Look at us. Six years together. Do we care about each other any less? Want any less to be in each others’ lives?”</p><p>Even as short as a year ago, he would have felt a twinge in his heart at so cavalierly speaking of their relationship, but as time had worn on, mention of it no longer inspired the same ruinous nostalgia. There were exceptions, every now and then. Like the night the assassins came. Right before, when he had been in Toph’s room and they embraced, her face wonderfully close to his, and he lapsed long enough to fear that to interact any further with such compulsions would lead to an unbearable betrayal he refused to visit on her, and again, he was reminded of his communion. Of Yue, and the lesson she had left him with. The same lesson that Suki was teaching him now.</p><p>He smiled. Fully. Peacefully. “No. We don’t.”</p><p>Suki mirrored it. “Go get her.”</p><p>“There’s something we have to do first. Put a stop to the guy behind all this. Aang says he knows where he’s gone, so it won’t be long before this is all finally over. She doesn’t need any other distractions right now. After that… After that, I’ll tell her everything.” He nodded, a newfound resolution setting him at ease. “I’m really happy you’re here, Suki.”</p><p>She clapped his shoulder. “Me too.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The penultimate chapter, bromigos. Next up, the finale! (And a gooey-ass epilogue after that.)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Aang, Katara, Sokka, Toph, Suki and Zuko assault the tower.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>SURE HAS BEEN A MINUTE, HUH</p><p>I've finally had the time to sit down and wrap this thing up. Just in time for the holidays, too! Enjoy, everyone.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When the six of them were in a room together, silence was typically the last thing any of them could expect. The present stillness of the air was all the more palpable for it.</p><p>Katara had watched Zuko’s face tighten as they walked the streets, past the stone pens of city guards and quiet straggles of people that quickly averted their eyes from the procession, then tighten further as they entered the Council Hall and saw the droves of the wounded, hungry, and desperate. That he was not an emotive man made the subtle pensive tugs in his expression speak volumes more—he was disgusted, as well he should have been. They sat now in the lounge above the main chamber, waiting for him to speak.</p><p>The silence was not absolute. His and Kuei’s advisors bickered, amongst themselves and between one another, but that had quickly become background noise. Katara was only vaguely aware of it, focused much more intently on the friends that surrounded her. Toph was quiet, and it took someone that knew her as well as Katara did to know that she was lost in deep thought instead of simply not paying attention. Sokka’s eyes seemed focused on something beyond the room’s walls, as though a plan were formulating in his mind. Aang’s palms rested on his knees, not a muscle twitching even when the nearby advisors’ quickly loudening argument sometimes reached shrill and obnoxious highs, for he was resolutely focused on Zuko. Suki, ever the stoic soldier, had a hand resting on the grip of one of her fans, eyes scanning the room as if a threat would materialize at any moment, or perhaps hoping one of the advisors would succumb to a sudden onset of murderous intent. Zuko simply sat statuesque, the rectitude of his posture belying a well-masked contempt.</p><p>It was only when one of Kuei’s advisors, backed by Zuko’s, urged Kuei to wipe his hands of the matter that had drawn them to Cranefish in the first place that Zuko spoke. “You’d ask us to remain neutral? After everything we’ve seen here?”</p><p>“With all due respect, Fire Lord,” tension pressurized the room as Kuei’s advisor began, “we agreed that the colonies should self-govern. They should handle their own affairs.”</p><p>“And you trust them to do that? The colony governors, who are all involved in a supremacist conspiracy?”</p><p>“To intervene would strip the colonies of agency. It’s not our place. History will see it as an occupation.”</p><p>A subtle pang of guilt flashed across his face. “It would see inaction as complacency…”</p><p>“Is it really complacency,” one of Zuko’s advisors spoke now, “to leave the resolution of this matter in the very capable hands of the Avatar and his colleagues?”</p><p>“It doesn’t feel right to do nothing,” Zuko snapped at no-one in particular. “There are people in this very building that were nearly butchered by the leaders that alleged to protect them. How are we any better than murderers if we turn a blind eye?”</p><p>“I understand that, Your Majesty. And you are right to wish to do something. But the wounds of the Hundred Year War are still fresh. For the Fire Nation to intervene—we simply risk too much.”</p><p>Kuei inched forward, the desire to divest himself of an uncomfortable discussion edging out the sheepishness in his limbs. “I-I think I would like to call a short recess.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maybe that’s best. I have some things to discuss with my friends.”</p><p>Kuei and both he and Zuko’s advisors filed out of the room, leaving the six to themselves.</p><p>“Suki, do you mind?” Zuko asked.</p><p>Suki retrieved a pad of papers from a leather satchel. Katara recognized them immediately—the things they had pilfered from Lao’s records in Ba Sing Se.</p><p>Zuko was about to lay them on the table that separated him from the couch where Katara and Aang were sitting when he froze, as if he just then remembered who it was the records belonged to. His eyes went straight to Toph. “Toph, your father, is he—”</p><p>“He’s fine,” she said, making no efforts to sound pleased.</p><p>Zuko breathed a sigh of relief for his friend and continued, laying the papers across the table and landing his finger on the sigil at the bottom of one. The spider with a bladed gnomon on its back. “Do any of you know what this symbol is?”</p><p>They shook their heads.</p><p>“This is the mark of the Sundial Collective. A clandestine organization whose sole purpose seems to be to sow chaos wherever it goes. To what end, we don’t know yet, but they’re dangerous. Extremely dangerous.”</p><p>“How do you know about them?” Katara asked.</p><p>“We’ve dealt with them before,” Suki said. “They’ve tried to assassinate Zuko twice.”</p><p>“And made a decent effort of it, too,” Zuko went on before any of his friends could voice their concern. “They’re organized, efficient—until now, we didn’t know that they operated outside of the Fire Nation. Seems they’re enterprising. And it seems clear to me that this Gato of yours is a member.”</p><p>Katara’s fist clenched at the name. Aang’s hand came to rest on her knee.</p><p>“Aang,” Zuko said, “you said you know where he is.”</p><p>Aang nodded. “I know where he might be, at least. There’s a huge tower northeast of the city, in the mountains., that he uses as his staging ground. I can’t think of anywhere else he’d go, not after we shot all his plans here. I don’t know that we’ll find him there, though—Gato’s smart enough to know that staying there’s a bad idea, and it’s already been a couple days since he fled the city. Still, we don’t have any other leads. We might find something there if we’re lucky.”</p><p>“How do you know about it?” Sokka asked.</p><p>Katara felt Aang’s hand tense on her knee. She lay her own over it, and the gesture seemed to settle over the whole room.</p><p>Aang cleared his throat and told the others what he had told her the previous morning. His capture at Gato’s hands as they left for Ba Sing Se, and the atrocities that had befallen him within the tower’s dark walls. When Aang revealed that Gato had tried to do to him what Azula had done during the war, Zuko deflated.</p><p>Toph no longer looked lost in thought. No, she looked very, very focused now.</p><p>“How’d you escape?” Sokka asked, gobsmacked, incredulous, an expression mirrored by Suki.</p><p>It occurred to Katara then that even she did not know that, for she had stopped Aang short of divulging that detail to her last time. She turned to him, hoping to convey with her eyes that he did not have to speak about it if he didn’t wish to.</p><p>But as he caught sight of Zuko, saw the wide-eyed shame on his face, he sat a little straighter. His fingers fell still on her knee again. “Gato had me bound to metal posts by chains. Tall ones, tall enough to draw the lightning. I redirected it.”</p><p>Zuko’s brow leapt into his hairline. At least, that’s what Katara assumed, because hers certainly did, and she could not take her eyes off Aang long enough to look at anyone else.</p><p>“But you couldn’t move,” Zuko said.</p><p>“No, but my qi paths could. Just like you taught me. I waited for the lightning to strike the post, drew it into one arm through the chain, redirected it through the other and exploded the opposite post.”</p><p>“While you were completely immobilized.”</p><p>“Yeah. Yeah, it was sorta like the chains were extensions of my arms.”</p><p>“How did you know it would work?” Katara asked.</p><p>He turned to her, but his eyes danced between hers and his lap. “Well… I didn’t, really. I just hoped for the best.”</p><p>“Azula,” Zuko muttered. “Gato tried to… Aang, I—”</p><p>“I’m alive because of what you taught me,” Aang said. “Don’t apologize.”</p><p>If anyone planned to say anything more on the matter, they did not get the chance. Aang went on. “I didn’t get a good look at the tower’s defenses when I escaped. We may have to make it up as we go along.”</p><p> “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Sokka said, picking up on the cue to move on as he and Aang shared a look, an imperceptible nod of the head, a thank-you and a no-problem. “I’d suggest we scout the place out first, but it sounds like we’re short on time.”</p><p>“Better to wait,” Toph said. “Zuko’s still gotta talk to his advisors, right? We can scout the place out in the meantime.”</p><p>“I don’t know that I’ll be able to convince them to help,” Zuko said. “As much as I may not like it, they’re right. Fire Nation interference would be volatile. One way or another… I’ll meet you guys at the tower. Suki, can you go with them?”</p><p>A sly smile twitched across her face. “I was planning on it whether you wanted me to or not.”</p><p>Tonight, then. No matter what, they attacked tonight. Katara looked around, and where someone else might have seen eagerness, she saw exhaustion. She felt a fleeting fury at the respite Gato had cost them.</p><p>But he was not going to wait, and neither could they.</p><p>Tonight.</p><p> </p><p>Sokka sat in the lounge, now empty, with his armour donned and his helmet and weapons laid out on the table before him. His axe and warclub, good for shattering armour and splintering shields—bitter work of which he wagered there would be plenty in the confines of the towers’ corridors. A tanto, a gift from Suki; Sokka had had it for so long now, held it so dearly, that he could trace the irregularities in the hamon along the blade’s spine with his finger from memory. It had saved his life almost as many times as she had, in shield walls and other intimate murderous embraces. A jian, another gift, this one commissioned by Zuko at the end of the war, the craftsmanship of which still marveled Sokka to this day. Differential heat treatment had left the centre of the blade with a dark pattern with smoky edges spanning the length of cross-section—a colour reminiscent of his lost space sword, his beloved space sword—whereas the edges and tip of the blade itself retained their crystalline sheen. In the right light or when Sokka breathed on the blade in the cold of winter, wisps like topography lines showed, evidence of the hundreds of folds in the steel. The cross guard and pommel were of bronze, and etched into the bottom of the pommel was a full moon—the same lunar phase as that depicted in the soapstone bosses on the chest and shoulders of Sokka’s mantle. “So she can guide your hand,” Zuko had told him upon presenting him with the blade.</p><p>He reached for them, those stories with blades attached, and saw that his hand was trembling, its usual steadiness gone. He took a deep breath and clenched his fist as if to will the shaking away.</p><p>Fighting was always sour business. Sourer was the prelude, the hours, the minutes before a battle. A rolling stomach. A dry mouth. Shaky hands. He knew the feeling well. He once thought that it would eventually stop, as many things do with acclimation. As the years marched on and the battles tallied high, that never came to pass.</p><p>“You alright there, meathead?”</p><p>Toph’s voice, came from the doorway to Sokka’s left. It made him jump, and he fought embarrassment at having been caught in a moment of vulnerability. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine.”</p><p>She moved from the door and sat next to him on the couch. “Never knew you to be the jittery type.”</p><p>“I’m not,” he said it sharper than he wanted.</p><p>Toph raised her hands, making no further indication that she would pursue that particular thread of conversation. Sokka was struck by a sudden guilt—for the sharpness in his voice, for lying—and more potent than that a simple desire to hear Toph’s voice, and her advice To have her know him. “Pre-fight jitters,” he sighed, not quite yet bringing himself to look at her. “Always gotten them before a fight.”</p><p>An eyebrow cocked in disbelief. “Really?”</p><p>“Always.”</p><p>Toph leaned back. “Could’ve fooled me. Never seen you lose your cool in a fight before.”</p><p>“Well, sure. Everything’s clear when you’re fighting, y’know? Colours are brighter, voices are more distinct, sometimes it feels like your body is moving without you having to ask it to. Sometimes it’s just pure adrenaline keeping you from losing your head. It’s funny,” he paused to laugh at the recollection, how alien it seemed, “the only time I didn’t get the shakes before a fight was my very first one. When Zuko first showed up at the South Pole. I was so eager to prove to myself that I was the warrior my dad needed me to be. Thought I was ready, I could take anything that came my way. Then that ship came out of the mist, and it all became real in a second,” he snapped his fingers, “just like that. Always stuck with me, I guess. Never been able to shake it.</p><p>“So, yeah,” he exhaled. “It’s not like Gato’s any worse than anything we’ve faced before, but… All it takes is one, y’know? Just one guy being a little bit faster. I’ll be fine once we’re out there on the move. It’s just the anticipation that gets me. Always has.”</p><p>Toph said nothing for a few quiet moments. “Nobody else knows, do they?”</p><p>Sokka laughed. Was he really so easy to read? “Nobody. Well, no, not nobody. Suki knows. And Dad, Bato—but Katara doesn’t know. Aang and Zuko don’t, either.”</p><p><em>But you told me</em>, said Toph’s sightless eyes, dancing unknowingly across the weapons on the table at their legs. “Everything’ll work out,” she said suddenly, as though she knew not what else to say. “Always does. Nobody’s gonna die.”</p><p>Sokka nodded, content enough with that assurance, and stood to buckle his weapons about himself, knowing they would be leaving soon. His club and axe hung at his waist, his tanto was sheathed against the greave on his right leg, and his sword’s scabbard was slung over his back, its leather strap sashed across his chest. He tested the fit and loosened the buckle by a few holes.</p><p>All that remained was his helmet, the wolf’s visage, and when he turned to pick it up, it was gone from the table. Toph held it in her hands, and she was facing him, a small, unsure smile on her face.</p><p>Sokka smiled back and ducked, trying not to make too much of a show of how low he had to bend in order for Toph to reach him, and she slipped it on his head. The hide camail draped over his shoulders, its white fur edge a stark ragged line against the dark blue of the mantle that covered his chest, back and upper arms. He tested the fit of his vambraces and the laces on his gambeson and, happy with both, indicated with a nod that he was ready to go.</p><p>Before that, Toph reached up, hands coming to rest on both sides of his helmet, and she kissed the snout of the wolf head. The warmth of her palms bled dimly through the layers of thin metal plating and boiled leather, though his cheeks were plenty warm regardless. “Let’s hit the road, soldier-boy.”</p><p>If he intended to respond—<em>if</em>, for Sokka did not know if he could or was going to—he was cut short by a much more familiar show of affection. A stiff cuffing upside the flank of his helmet, knocking it askew and Sokka off-balance. It had deflected arrows and boomerangs, swords and spears, kept him from many a gruesome death, but a knock from Toph was one of the more standout blows it had been dealt. By the time he righted it on his head, she had left the room, and he smiled contentedly to himself as he followed in her footsteps. They regrouped with the others outside, and together they left Cranefish City.</p><p>It unnerved Sokka how quiet the streets were. How potent a reminder the silence was of the horrors that had begotten it. The lack of sound was a sound itself so foreign to Cranefish that it imbued the air with a tingling surrealism. It felt as though they were walking through a dream, and that was another feeling Sokka found eerily familiar, one to which he much preferred trembling hands, for it was the calm before the storm. It was the loudest thing, always, prior to a battle; the murmur of half-hearted conversation, the dry retches of nervous vomiting, the clattering of shields and scabbards and grinding of whetstones as men sought to mask the shaking in their limbs by preoccupying themselves with perfunctory tasks—an army steeling itself was a noisy affair, but the calm of dawning war, the false peace of adrenaline, was the background of it all.</p><p>But the buildings, lurching things, knelt in prostration, supplicant as they looked on at their passage, and what did Sokka see as he looked at his friends but resolve. Conviction. Surety. Cold determination. With a smile, he thought that there were no other people in the Four Nations in whom Gato could have found a worse enemy. Tonight, his tyranny came to an abrupt and ignominious end.</p><p> </p><p>As they scaled the hill before them, skulking, prone as they reached its rain-dampened crest and hidden among gaunt trees, Sokka mused that the lupine helmet on his head was fitting.</p><p>The tower was not the lone structure in the mountains. No, Gato’s refuge was not a single imperious spire, but also a considerable compound at its foot, and at the gate of its northern wall had gathered many of Gato’s men, the cumbersome clunking and rumbling of their vehicles reverberating through the cool earth. Not a convoy of simple stagecoaches, but troop transports—ungainly things whose every exertion sent gouts of steam hissing out of the manifolds on its flanks, evidently paid for with the wealth Gato had so carefully concealed in his many deceptions.</p><p>“They’re preparing to leave,” Toph whispered to Sokka’s right.</p><p> “I can’t believe they haven’t yet,” Aang said from further down the line. “I was sure this place would be empty. Why would they stick around?”</p><p>“Gato must still here,” Sokka said. “We’ll find out why.”</p><p>He surveyed the compound, hastening to formulate the plan that his friends were doubtlessly waiting for. Their vantage point allowed them to see over the western wall that faced them, an obstruction that would pose no difficulty to the pair of earthbenders to Sokka’s right, though getting in was hardly their greatest obstacle. The slope leading to the tower’s entrance was beveled by several staircases, at the top of any of which could be placed a firm defensive line. The vehicles presented no immediate threat save for the threat of Gato escaping, but Sokka could not spot him in the courtyard, so it was likely that he was still in the tower. The tower itself was an obstacle all on its own, and the thought of fighting up its innumerable narrow flights did little for his enthusiasm.</p><p>Zuko arriving alone didn’t help much either.</p><p>The five of them turned at once to the footsteps behind them and, to Zuko’s credit, he hadn’t even flinched. Sokka chided himself for not setting up a perimeter, but in all fairness, even if they had, if Zuko had wanted to slip past them undetected, he could have without much effort. Guy moved like a ghost.</p><p>They breathed a collective sigh of relief and abided him a space to lay down next to them. “No backup, huh?” Suki asked.</p><p>Zuko shook his head. “They were pretty adamant that I not show up either. A real shame the Fire Lord is asleep in his quarters, isn’t it?”</p><p>Katara nudged him with her elbow, a thankful smile on her face.</p><p>“What have we got?” he asked.</p><p>“Aang, Katara and Zuko,” Sokka began, “you three head up top. Work your way down from there. Toph, Suki and I will enter the ground floor and move up. Take it floor-by-floor. Wherever Gato is in there, we’ll find him.” He looked back to the stairs leading to the tower’s entrance. “Lots of strong defensive positions on the approach, so we have to move fast. Can’t let them organize a defense.</p><p>“I’ll trash their vehicles,” the cool anticipation was clear in Toph’s voice. “That’ll cut off their escape and give you and Suki a way inside.”</p><p>“Perfect. Meet up with us inside once you’re done.” Sokka said nothing further, but the others looked at him expectantly. “What?”</p><p>“Is that it?” Katara asked. “Simple as that?”</p><p>“Simple as that.” His palms hummed as he reached for his weapons. “Ready?”</p><p>“Ready,” came the response.</p><p>“Go.”</p><p>They moved in a burst of flamelight. Zuko propelled himself into the sky with jets of fire, tearing an orange scar across the blackness of night and Aang and Katara followed close behind, soaring silently together. Shouts of surprise came from the men beyond the wall, followed by a haphazard hail of arrows.</p><p>Sokka slid down the hill, club and axe firm in-hand and Suki and Toph at his side. Toph stomped the wall down and she hurtled through the breach, dragging the ragged edges of the wall with her and sending them as stone torrents at the panicked soldiers. Spears of stone erupted beneath the vehicles, impaling them or inverting them, sending them crashing back down and flattening rock and metal and man. “Get inside!” she shouted over her shoulder, then turned back to her doomed opponents.</p><p>Sokka started on the approach to the tower and looked up. Zuko incinerated a cloud of arrows and blew a hole in the wall of one of the upper floors. He, Aang and Katara surged through.</p><p>Just as they entered up top, soldiers came pouring out of the tower’s entrance below, and rushed down the steps to meet their attackers. Suki flicked out her shield and charged. Sokka followed.</p><p>A staggered wall of shields awaited them. Sokka ran, ran hard, bounding up the stairs, screaming, hands so tight around the grips of his weapons that the world could not pry them from him and he leapt wildly, rearing them over his head and bringing them down with all his weight and fury behind them.</p><p>The first clash. Sokka’s axe cleaved into a bronze shield, the impact shuddering up his arm, echoed in his other as he slammed his warclub into the top of the man’s head, crunching helmet and skull. The man before him dropped, leaving an opening in the disorganized shield wall that had come in vain to halt he and Suki’s advance. He deflected a blow from the right, the shield still embedded on the blade of his axe, hammered the shield of the man to his left, dropped, swept right with his club and knocked the first of the two men down, brought the axe-shield back over his head to block a follow-up, stamped his heel in the face of the downed soldier as he stood, bending the nosepiece of his helmet and smashing teeth and he clubbed the split shield clear of his axe blade. The man on his left thrust a blade at him; Sokka crossed his weapons over himself and shoved up, knocking the blade high and hooking the beard of his axe over the top rim of his attacker’s shield, peeling it away to clout him broadside with his club.</p><p>Three down. Screams erupted ahead to his right—Suki had pushed through. She clashed shields with a man and crossed her fan over to slash his throat, the same red that dashed her eyes now spattering her shield and face. She pushed over him, batted away another blade, cut once, twice, again up her assailant’s arm then drew her fan back and caught him across the face, the blade grinding through bone.</p><p>More came through the tower doors to bolster the vanguard’s quickly dwindling numbers. Sokka swung up into a man’s gut with his club, doubling him over to follow up with an axe blow to his exposed neck. He charged up the stairs to fall in line with Suki, advancing hard, and the two of them swept and cleaved and thrashed and cut and killed, driving through Gato’s ranks amid bubbling ribbons of blood.</p><p>They pushed into the tower’s foyer, clear, for now. Sokka turned to shut the doors behind them and saw more men charging up the approach. Just when they were about to reach the doors, a sheet of rock burst upwards and sealed them outside, following by muffled screams. Toph had them covered.</p><p>“You okay?” Sokka asked, not yet out of breath.</p><p>Suki nodded, flicking blood from her fan. “You?”</p><p>“Still on this side of the dirt.” His nostrils flared. “Smells like almonds in here.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>Myriad footfalls rumbled towards them from ahead. More men came bursting through the doors atop the stairs, and they rushed down greet their guests.</p><p>“Forget it,” Sokka shook the thought from his mind. “You ready for this?”</p><p>Suki grinned, wicked and foretelling. “Born ready.”</p><p>As was he. They charged, and the real fight began.</p><p> </p><p>“Go.”</p><p>Aang wrapped an arm around Katara’s side and the two of them launched into the air behind Zuko, jets of roaring flame driving him up and ahead. It was not long after that Aang heard the shrieking and lurching of strained metal and the screams of a fight beginning below, and no sooner that it all fell from hearing as they reached the tower’s dizzying peak.</p><p>The arrows came, a startling amount given the suddenness of their attack. Aang clenched Katara tighter against his side and rolled, arched, swept and dove to avoid the barrage. Zuko fanned his arms out and spun, turning all projectiles around him to dust, and when he righted himself he punched a hole in the wall of one of the tower’s upper floors. Too many archers to negotiate ascending any further outside. Aang dove in after him.</p><p>He and Katara drifted across the polished wood floors inside. Zuko had already engaged the enemy, pushing them down the corridor. He put his boot to a shield and blasted the man behind it to the other end of the hall with a torrent of flame, yanked the strap of one of his dao across his chest to send it leaping from the scabbard into his waiting hand and followed through, slicing and burning and driving hard. “Go!” he shouted over his shoulder. “I’m right behind you!”</p><p>So they did. Aang burned through the ceiling to the floor above, sending a corona of fire pillaring through the tower with Katara clutched to his side until they reached the top. There, they found a door. Only one.</p><p>Aang hesitated at the threshold. “This is it. At least, I think so.”</p><p>Katara took his hand. “You’re not alone. Not this time.”</p><p>He brought her hand to his lips. “Not this time.”</p><p>Aang took a deep breath, steadied, and kicked the door out of the frame.</p><p>Beyond lay his old prison. The wide, cavernous room in which Gato’s men had sought to weaponize his mind against him. In it, soldiers lining the walls, standing sentinel. And standing in the column of moonlight shining through the hole in the roof at the other end of the chamber, Gato himself. “Have you any idea,” he turned to face them, his hushed voice amplified by the massive room, “what you have cost me?” His arm was in a sling.</p><p>“A bunch of dirty money and a perfectly healthy wrist?” Aang deadpanned.</p><p>“Years of planning. Careful, quiet, deliberate planning, all mere moments from culmination.” He cast a look at his immobilized arm. “All for nothing. Wasted. Turned to dust by a band of miscreant pigs.”</p><p>“Planning can’t have been that careful, then.”</p><p>“I heard your friend, the Banished Prince, has arrived,” Gato paid no mind to the sarcasms. “I’m sure he’s told you of the attempts my colleagues made on his life. Well, you’ll be happy to know that I am no longer among the ranks of the Sundial Collective.” Gato retrieved from his coat pocket a balled sheet of parchment, which he tossed into the expanse between him and Aang and Katara. “Thanks to you, they have deemed that my usefulness to them is at an end. So, here I am. Cornered. My contacts severed. My empire turned to ash. But I shall build another. Oh, I shall build another, and your charred and broken bones will be its foundation.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Katara flicked the stopper out of the waterskin at her side and traced liquid blades in the air around her.</p><p>Someone bounded down the hall outside. Zuko appeared, broad-shouldered in the doorway, and he entered, hair astray and blades stained red.</p><p>“Your Majesty the Firelord Zuko,” Gato bowed in pretend servility. “What a pleasure it is for you to join us.”</p><p>“I’d hardly call it that.” Zuko sheathed his twin dao. “People like you are rarely pleasant company.”</p><p>“Oh? Apprise me, who might ‘people like me’ be?”</p><p>“Fascists. Dictators.” He drew his fist back, pulsing with flame. “Dead men yet to die.”</p><p>Gato laughed. “Come then, and deliver me.”</p><p>He waved his men forward.</p><p> </p><p>“Watch your left!”</p><p>Just as Sokka registered the warning a blow struck the side of his helmet. A spear glanced off its flank, the metal plate and boiled leather holding firm, for the spearman had stumbled in the thrust and heave of soldiers and weight fell from behind the strike. Sokka responded to the blow with one of his own, smashing the spear to splinters and following through by burying the blood-slickened blade of his axe into the spearman’s frightened face.</p><p>The fight had worsened, as they always do. Sokka did not tire easily—experience and adrenaline and youth imbued his body and blows with ceaseless lethality—but even he felt the wear on his bones and in the superficial wounds he had sustained as he and Suki scythed through Gato’s ranks, advancing inexorably up through the tower’s innumerable floors. Indeed, it was experience and adrenaline and youth that impelled him through the impending weariness.</p><p>And he would need more of it. His axe blade had cleaved too deep, sucked into a gasping gap of blood and teeth and mulched face, and the weight of the corpse dragged it out of his hand, helped as he was driven back by the ranks that closed around the man he had killed. Over bronze rims he saw snarling, helmeted faces, portents of death in their eyes—three men shoulder-to-shoulder, for that was as many as the narrow corridors allowed. Sokka gripped his club in both hands and beat their shields, beat them like a drum, again and again and again until the dented bronze gave way and he smashed through. The savagery of his blows left him exposed and he had to drop his club, too, if he wished not to perish there. He backstepped, waited for the battered shields to advance and open, and he pulled down hard on the strap of his jian and launched it from the scabbard over his shoulder, where he caught it and swung down, slicing clean through the opening an attacker had foolishly afforded him.</p><p>“I didn’t teach you that!” Suki called through a smile. She deflected a blow and countered, having swapped from her fans to her katana.</p><p>“If we don’t die, I’ll show you!”</p><p>The operative <em>if </em>grew more dubious by the moment as more men flooded the halls. Over the writhe of helmeted heads lay a flight of stairs, descended by reinforcements, and it was at its foot that Sokka and Suki would have the greatest advantage.</p><p>So he grabbed a pair of shields from the floor, called for Suki to close ranks, and pushed.</p><p>Blades clattered against the overlapped bronze in front of him, the bones in his arms rattling under the swarm of impacts. The soldiers pushed back, but that was their undoing; the men in the rear ranks crushed the men in the front against Sokka’s shield wall, and in that closeness they could not adequately wield their weapons. Overhead Suki’s blade flashed red, spearing and slicing, parrying and killing. Blows glanced off the metal strips lining Sokka’s boots, over the rims of the shields to prod his helmet, thumped against the wall of bronze he was holding as if he fought of a storm of the things, cascading all around him. Suki shouted and challenged and roared, thinned their numbers with stinging steel from behind Sokka’s stalwart defense. Together they pushed.</p><p>A spear shot between Sokka’s legs, aiming to trip him up and expose him for the kill. He dared not stop his advance, dared not give an inch of ground, but as the spear drew back it took a bit of leg with it. Pain burst up his calf like spreading flame and he fell to a knee. For a moment, the shields he held faltered.</p><p>Then a hand gripped his collar and yanked him back. He fell, clumsily hitting himself in the chest and chin with the shields, and as he looked over their dented surfaces he saw Suki spinning, pirouetting, whirling, a cloud of blades as she deflected blow after blow, the wild arcs of her weapons driving the men back. She planted her foot against a shield and leapt high over their heads, darting across the wall with demonic speed and landing behind them on the stairs. Those she did not cut to ribbons she sent crashing down the steps with bone-dusting kicks.</p><p>“Suki!” Sokka struggled to his feet. More men appeared behind her. How many were there in this damned tower? “Suki!”</p><p>She turned and fought, blades keening, turned again, caught between two fronts. Driven back, towards their goal but away from Sokka, she disappeared around the corner atop the flight.</p><p>Sokka only just got both feet under him when another man knocked him down again, falling on top of him to drive a sword up through his stomach. Sokka threw his hips out right, pulled the tanto out of his boot as he kicked at the knee of another approaching enemy, ignoring the sears of pain boiling through his leg and drove the tanto through the eye of the man atop him, driving it hard, further, further until he felt its fine blade grind against his eye socket and wrenched it out. The corpse half-fell on him and he shrimped out from beneath it. He sat up, drew his sword, thrust it at the man he’d kicked who was now back afoot, but the blow was wasted on his armour and again Sokka felt the blood-puddled floor against his back as his attacker slammed into him, knocking his jian from his grip. It was a brambly-bearded, rot-mouthed man, his foul breath overpowering the pungent stench of blood and bile that fumed in the corridor. A blade crossed over to saw across his throat and Sokka brought his arm up and in, the steel finding purchase instead in the leather and fur of his vambrace. Heat that Sokka knew was blood pooled beneath it. Tanto still in-hand, he slammed it between Rot-mouth’s ribs, then again, then a third time right to the hilt and he felt the thump of broken ribs against his hand.</p><p>Two more men rushed toward him from the ranks that still filled the hall, and it would not be long before the rest of them swarmed him. The one on the right swung a blade at him, swung wildly, angrily, the strikes slamming ineffectively against Rot-mouth’s corpse as Sokka shifted to shield himself with it. He ripped the tanto out from between the body’s ribs, hearing the faint hiss of air and bubbling of blood from the punctured lung, and stabbed his tanto at the swordsman’s ankle, dropped him low enough that he could drive the blade up beneath the man’s jaw, through his tongue, pinning his jaw to the roof of his mouth and driving it up behind his nose. Blood spigoted from the wound when he wrenched the blade out.</p><p>Another, this time the man on his left who had come with the man from the right. His eyes were a piercing, supernaturally yellow, so bright they could burn holes in whatever incurred their gaze, and he raised a dao over his head in both hands for a savage strike.</p><p>It came swift. Sokka turned his head away, hoping, praying that his helmet would take the brunt of the strike, and his ears rang and his head rang and his vision blurred and the steel and leather of his helmet gave way, crunching inwards and whether the sharpness against his cheek with was the inwardly snapped ridge of his helmet or the blade that had inflicted it he did not know.</p><p>Rage and terrible fear refocused everything and as the bright-eyed man reared up for another strike, Sokka shunted the body that was still on top of him, shifting right and the dao bit the wood where his head had been. He slapped the flat of the blade against the floor, pinning it there and he launched himself, somehow, he did not know how he did it from the position he was in, at his assailant and drove his shoulder and his tanto into the bright-eyed man’s stomach. He pinned him to the wall with his free arm, vambrace now soaked through with blood, and ripped the tanto up into him and through him. The bright-eyed man’s mouth and bright eyes were wide and silent. Blood spilled over Sokka’s feet.</p><p>Bright-eyes fell, a puddle of himself on the floor. Sokka turned to the men in the hall, still many ranks strong, but they shifted on their feet, uneasy at the sight of the blood-drenched wolf that refused to die. “Come on!” Sokka screamed and thumped his chest. He screamed again, a wordless roar. “Come on! Kill me!”</p><p>Buy time. All he had to do was buy time.</p><p>He screamed again, screamed until they charged. Sokka poised himself for the fight and his death. And death came, but not for him.</p><p>Someone behind yelled for him to duck. Reflexively he did, and violently and quite suddenly his vision was clear of foes. Masses slammed into them and sent them hurtling through the hall as pulverised heaps. Wood crunched and splintered, muscle and bone twisted and cracked. Men screamed and beat a hasty retreat, hunks of rock splitting their withdrawal like a river.</p><p>Just like that, they were gone. Sokka fell on his backside, taking respite not because he wished to but because his body demanded to. He looked up at his saviour as she hurtled towards him. Toph.</p><p>“Are you okay? Take your helmet off!” she shouted as though she were chiding him, but cupped his face in her hands, worrying the cut on his cheek. “Answer me!”</p><p>“I’m alright!” Sokka lied as he put his hand on her neck, and were she not covered in dirt and blood already he would have felt sorry for adding to it. “I’m alright. You?”</p><p>“You almost gave me a fucking heart attack,” she enunciated the expletive with a thump to his shoulder, “but yes, I’m fine.” Her eyes danced from one wound to the next, first the one on his face, then his leg, then his arm, the vambrace once a deep blue, now black with blood. “Where’s Suki?”</p><p>“Suki,” Sokka said, breathless, then snapped to attention. “Suki! We got separated! Come on, we gotta move!”</p><p> </p><p>Were it not for the torrents of water announcing her position, Aang would have lost sight of Katara in the toss and heave of the fight.</p><p>They were surrounded and fighting hard. A sword hissed through the air. Aang blocked it with his staff, knocked it aside, sent the man tumbling across the chamber and into his cohorts. He arched back beneath another swing, snapped back upright, pushed an attacker away and swung his leg out at another who caught it and kicked low; Aang leapt up over the sweep and kicked out of the man’s grip, rolling off his shoulders beneath another swing as he landed. More came to fill the voids Aang had left in their ranks and he pirouetted in response, staff whirling in wide arcs to keep Gato’s men at range. He stopped spinning only to switch directions, trying to keep his movements from prediction. In the caesurae between his whirls and pirouettes he saw Katara snap tendrils of water at her attackers, disarm them with whips and drive them away with wide-sweeping tentacles. Icy blades sang in the air around her, razors that kept the soldiers at bay.</p><p>“Aang!” Zuko called, and Aang turned to see two helices of flame coiling toward him and joining together to form a roiling pillar. Aang, understanding Zuko’s intention, swung down hard, an arc of air slicing the flame in two and blasting it against the walls of the chamber, just over the soldiers’ heads. They ducked away and Katara followed through with twin tides of water, smashing them against the walls and freezing them there. Those that had not already been incapacitated were now trapped in frigid prisons, the chamber a diorama.</p><p>A moment to breathe. “Everyone alright?” Aang asked. Katara and Zuko nodded in response, at which point they turned, in unison, to Gato.</p><p>Even now he stood still, having not moved from his place at the head of the room since the fight began. Perhaps now he wished he had, for he looked from the men incapacitated on the floor to those frozen against the rushlight-lined walls, their wan flames extinguished. He growled, and drew a karambit. “Your friends may get me in a rush, but not before I split your throat from one ear to the other.”</p><p>Katara’s response was to thrash him into submission.</p><p>Water surged from her arm as a whip with which she cracked him across the eyes, then his hand to disarm him, then his slung arm, then again, and again until he was howling in anguish at his broken-again wrist. She slung the tendril around his ankle, ripped him off his feet and lashed him again and again and again, beating him, beating him mercilessly, welting him beneath his fine clothes across his shoulders and his ribs and on his legs and stomach and arms and face.</p><p>“Katara,” Aang started towards her.</p><p>The whip snaked into itself, ungloving from her hand, and solidified in her palm. A pick of solid ice.</p><p>Aang caught her arm. “Katara!”</p><p>Her arm shook in his hand. Indecision. The vacillation between retribution and mercy. The fury he saw in her eyes then was an old one, one he had not seen, and one she had not known, since the war. It only fled when her face locked with his. “What he did to you…”</p><p>“He’s finished,” Aang said. “It’s done.”</p><p>“It’s never finished,” Gato hissed.</p><p>Katara spiked the pick at her feet, shattering it. “Shut the fuck <em>up</em>!”</p><p>She punctuated her command by kicking Gato’s limp wrist against his ribs. He howled in response, and for the moment, it seemed that was enough. Katara’s hand found Aang’s, and they stood over him in silence, a man broken and beaten. Zuko came to their side.</p><p>At the entrance of the chamber they heard shouting. Someone charged into the room, a man speared on the end of their sword. She pinned him against the doorframe, roaring as she did. She ripped the blade down from gullet to gut, wrenched down and drew it out, sending a crimson ribbon splattering across the floor. She stood over the twitching corpse, breath ragged and heavy, shoulders heaving. She screamed in his dead face. Suki.</p><p>They stared at her a moment. She turned, noticed them watching, and stumbled into the chamber. She looked a thing possessed. Tears in her armoured kimono revealed savage cuts and bruises. Hair fell awry around her wild eyes, bracketing a face splashed with blood and split with a wicked grimace of killer fury. From hilt to tip, her katana was red.</p><p>“Aang, Katara,” she bowed her head. “Your Majesty.”</p><p>“Are you, uh,” Zuko looked her up and down, “are you alright?”</p><p>Her grin was tired and terrible. “You should see the other guy.”</p><p>“Where are Sokka and Toph?” Katara asked.</p><p>“We were separated.” She clamped a filthy hand across her forehead.</p><p>Katara started forward. “What? Where?”</p><p>“A few floors down, I don’t know.” Suki flicked the gore from her katana. “I’m heading back to find him.”</p><p>“I’ll go with you.”</p><p>Gato laughed. First a whisper-chuckle, then a maniac’s cackle. “We’re not going anywhere.”</p><p>“Drop the act,” Aang said as he turned back to him. “It’s over.”</p><p>“I keep telling you, it’s never over. This doesn’t end with me. The Sundial Collective will continue its work, and while they may have forgotten me, the world will not. The world will remember me.”</p><p>“Only as a tyrant.”</p><p>“No, Aang. As the man that killed an Avatar.”</p><p>The entire tower shook. Deep in its bowels came a rumble and a boom. Then another, and another, all in sequence until the explosions were just below their feet.</p><p>“What was that?!” Aang shifted his feet to balance himself.</p><p>“You thought I would leave anything standing before I left?!” Gato shouted. “Something for you to find?! Damn fool. I’d leave behind nothing but scorched earth. That you arrived to be here for it only makes it all the sweeter!”</p><p>The tower lurched, incapacitated soldiers beginning to slide to one wall.</p><p>“Sokka and Toph!” Katara shouted. “We have to find them!”</p><p>“I’ll do it,” Aang stamped his staff and moved for the door. “You three get everyone out of here!”</p><p>Behind him, as Aang fled the chamber, he heard laughter. “Better hurry, Avatar!”</p><p> </p><p>Sokka saw nothing but smoke and stars.</p><p>The corridor lurched. Crackling flames and splitting wood fought the ringing in his ears. Burnt wood, ceramic and flesh swelled into a pungent aggregate. Hot splinters dug into his palms as he tried to lift himself from the ash-dusted floor. The blast had upended him, left him not knowing where he was, and he had only the painful sensations of its aftermath to ground him.</p><p>His legs buckled as he stood, the pain renewing with reminding swiftness. The spear wound was quickly worsening, along with every other ache and burn. What had been a painful cut had become a weeping gash. He tried to stand again and could not. Toph was nowhere in sight. Fight through the pain. He stood.</p><p>“Toph,” he croaked, throat caked in smoke. Blood spattered his feet as he coughed the smoke from his lungs. Sweat and clotted blood stuck his helmet to his skin as he peeled it off his head. Worry made him quicken his pace despite the protests of his body. Fear made him move even faster. Catching himself looking for her face among the bodies, he shook the thought from his mind, the gesture inviting a lance of pain through his neck. “Toph! Where are you?!”</p><p>“Over here!” A hand shot up from amidst a clutch of bodies. Through the thickening smoke, Sokka could make her out, sitting still, poised among a pile of corpses and looking frantically for where his voice had come from. “I can’t see in here! Keep talking!”</p><p>“This way!” Sokka stepped across bodies piled like sandbags. “This way, alright? I’m coming! Just focus on my voice!”</p><p>The ceiling split open and a beam swung down, a burning pendulum that struck him broadside and clubbed the polluted air from his lungs. He hit the wall before the floor.</p><p>“Sokka! Sokka! Are you okay? Where are you?!”</p><p>“I’m fine,” he lied. On hands and knees he crawled, hoping to avoid any other similar surprises. His eyes and throat burned. “Couldn’t be better.”</p><p>That the place had not collapsed in the time it took him to reach Toph was nothing short of a miracle. He placed a hand on her shoulder to let her know he was there and she launched into his arms, grip nearly suffocating him and unbearable pain radiating across his ribs. Fight through it.</p><p>“I can’t see in here,” she said.</p><p>The boots of metal she had fashioned for herself were gone. Whether she lost them in the explosion or had spent them prior as a last offensive resort, Sokka did not know, but they had been the only thing that had permitted her sight in the wooden halls and stairwells of the tower, for she had at least been able to sense the way they struck the floor. That amenity was lost on her now. “Neither can I,” Sokka said. “Too much smoke,” as if the mutuality of it were a comfort.</p><p>“Blind leading the blind, huh?”</p><p>“Blind leading the blind.”</p><p>The two began walking, and surely that was a feat neither of them could have managed without the other. “What the hell happened?” Toph asked.</p><p>“I smelled almonds when we entered the tower.”</p><p>He felt her shrug against him. “You say that like it explains anything.”</p><p>“It was blasting jelly!” He sighed, as if expelling the fog from his mind with a breath. “The explosive compound smells like almonds. I didn’t think of it at the time, but—Gato must have planted stocks of it around the tower to cover his tracks. Or to kill us, I don’t know. Either way, this place is falling apart. We have to go.”</p><p>Together they limped, lurched and struggled; tripped, sweated and burned. Above them, great chunks of the tower peeled away, plummeting to craters of dust outside. Below, the groaning of buckling floors. Still they walked, both of them the only thing keeping the other upright. “What floor are we on?” Toph asked.</p><p>As if by taunting response, the floor gave out. Fell out from beneath them, opening into the corridor below. Their grip around one another tightened as they dropped through a plume of ash and Sokka turned like a cat midair to get himself under Toph before they slammed into the floor. She crushed against his chest with the impact and might have broken a couple of his ribs, and their combined weight peeled the floor away from the bottom of the exterior wall. It ramped down and they spilled towards the frigid outside. Sokka clawed, clawed desperately for a handhold and found none, not until they tumbled onto the eave outside where his fingers found a gap between the ceramic plates. The sudden stop nearly jerked Toph completely out of his grip, and had they not been holding hands prior it would have sent her plummeting to her death.</p><p>They dangled freely, swaying in the cold, thin air. “Well, now I definitely don’t know what floor we’re on!” Sokka, the fool that he was, looked down. They were high. Very, very, very high. The next closest eave that hadn’t been reduced to ribs of scorched wood was about twenty stories down. “Seems familiar, huh?!” he laughed.</p><p>Toph tried to laugh back. She really did.</p><p>Every wound was singing in stinging harmony, his entire body screaming. In protest of his own agony, he clenched his hand tighter around Toph’s. “Just hold on, alright? We’re gonna make it outta this!”</p><p>Although he could feel her hand in his, he looked down again to confirm she was still there. Somehow, her eyes found his perfectly. In them, a look hauntingly familiar. A look of finality.</p><p>Sokka’s own eyes rimmed with tears. Her hand began to slip. “I won’t let it end like this.”</p><p>“Don’t think you have a choice, tough guy,” came her tearful response. Despite his grip, her hand slipped further.</p><p> “Not again,” his voice was a desperate whisper. “Not again. Just a little longer, okay?! I’m gonna figure something out.”</p><p>“Look at me.”</p><p>There was a presence of her voice that terrified him. Like she was talking to him from inside his own head.</p><p>Whatever she was going to say stayed unsaid. She fell before she could say it.</p><p>Sokka didn’t think. He swung off and leapt.</p><p>Cold air stung his eyes, rushing past him, into him as he plummeted. Behind him, around him the entire tower listed, twisting and tearing, peeling itself apart, wood lashing out like recoiling bamboo and flicking scorched shards into the freezing sky as the tower fell away from itself. He caught her almost immediately. Toph screamed at the sudden presence.</p><p>“It’s me!” Sokka shouted over the wind. “It’s me! It was always going to be me…”</p><p>Chunks of skyscraper arched over them, a felled colossus, an orange hail of smouldering splinters falling all around. The booms below reverberated past them to shake the stars. Toph grabbed fistfuls of Sokka’s gambeson and he responded in kind. Just like old times. Together.</p><p>It was one of the many times Sokka had thought he would die that night. Once, pinned beneath a man with rancid breath trying to saw a sword across his throat; another, looking up at a bright-eyed man about to cleave a dao through his skull and feeling him nearly succeed; a third, staring at a swarm of shields and snarling faces, hoping he could buy whatever time he could with his life. A fourth and final time, in Toph’s arms and she in his, hurtling towards the earth as the scene of an apocalypse rained around them. It was not like the others, though. It did not have the gut-souring fear of imminent death, nor the screaming realization of it in his mind.</p><p>It was bliss. A kind of bliss, anyway. A kind that was good enough. “It was always going to be me,” he kept saying, not knowing if she could hear him over the roar of the rushing wind, but certain that it felt right to say.</p><p>Because it would have been him. A thousand times and a thousand more.</p><p>Sokka closed his eyes.</p><p>Then came a whistling sound. The two hands on his back became three.</p><p>His eyes snapped open. Their straight plummet angled hard and his stomach lurched, and he did not immediately recognize the sensation as them being pulled up for it only barely slowed them. Their descent curved and when they burst beneath a cloud of ash billowing into the sky Sokka saw a treeline hurtling toward them.</p><p>They hit the ground and tumbled. Sokka pulled Toph tighter to him, tight enough now that he was sure he was suffocating her as they rolled. Pebbles and twigs dug and stabbed at his back, his shoulders, all over him until they drifted to a stop.</p><p>A stop. They stopped. And weren’t dead, Sokka was pretty sure.</p><p>His entire body burned as he relaxed his grip around Toph. With marked hesitation she unclamped her eyes. Held breath burst from her. Sokka felt the heat of it on his neck and laughed. They were alive.</p><p>“Guys!” Sokka looked over his shoulder—immediately regretting it for the band of fire that radiated up his neck—and saw Aang sprinting toward them. He drifted to a stop on his knees.</p><p>Sokka rolled onto his back, still laughing, and he looked behind Aang to the towering inferno rearing over them, the graveyard at its feet. “We, we were—we were almost in that.”</p><p>Aang’s laughter joined his. A chorus of relief. One only interrupted by Toph snapping upright at his side.</p><p>“You would have died,” she said it like she should have been angry despite the arms she threw over Sokka’s shoulders. Despite the forehead she pressed to his. “Idiot. Idiot.”</p><p>Sokka embraced her back. “If that’s what it takes.” For all his wit, all other words he knew how to say had been wrung from him. Whisked from his mind by their harrowing descent.</p><p>He didn’t dare pull away, even to palm the tears that came unbidden to his eyes. “I love you.”</p><p>The lurching tower. The wind whistling through naked trees. Aang’s breath, held captive in waiting lungs. The aches in Sokka’s ribs as Toph pulled him tighter. All of it vanished. She pressed her lips to his.</p><p>In the silence that followed came hurried footsteps. The others arrived. Katara, Suki, Zuko with Gato in tow. Katara blurted their names, ran for them, but Aang barred her path. “Give them a minute,” he whispered, his smile audible in his hushed words.</p><p>They parted, took one another’s faces in callused hands. “I love you too,” Toph said.</p><p>Sokka turned, doing what little he could to keep the grin from his face, to his friends. Katara and Aang leaned into one another. Zuko nodded, his smile a thin line. Suki winked.</p><p>Gato looking like he’d had seven shades of shit kicked out of him was a nice touch, too.</p><p>It was over. His schemes. His designs. His empire-to-be. All of it died that night in that gaunt, cold forest. Brought to ruin by a wolf, a bandit, a prince, a warrior, a painted lady, and a nomad. By benders and non-benders alike.</p><p>Gato might have appreciated the irony of it, if he wasn’t such a sore loser. “You all think it’s over,” he hissed. Everyone turned to him. “The Sundial Collective may have turned their backs on me, but they are not the only friends I have. I’ll walk.” His laugh was a muffled cough, then a obnoxious shriek. “Understand me? I’ll walk!”</p><p>“You’ll walk,” Katara nodded. She leaned in close. “With a limp.”</p><p>Then she stomped his shin in half.</p><p> </p><p>Hot drinks, warm beds and warmer smiles awaited.</p><p>Ever a refuge, the Jasmine Dragon welcomed them back as it always did. The inside was a calm, quiet bustle, the entrance a portal to a calmer world than Ba Sing Se. But even the tranquility that suffused the air was not enough to win out over the thought of a comfortable bed.</p><p>Iroh was happy to oblige. “I’ll get three rooms ready for you.”</p><p>Sokka rubbed the back of his head.</p><p>“Two, actually,” Toph said, making a conscious effort to turn her head elsewhere. Perhaps to hide the redness of her face.</p><p>Iroh, who had more than enough worldly experience to perceive the meaning in those words, shot them a knowing look. One tempered with a dash of self-indulgent scandal. What with Aang and Katara being a walking pair of grins, any chances at subtlety were doomed from the start anyway. “Ah, young love. Two it is.”</p><p>With that deeply uncomfortable transaction concluded, the four of them retired to their rooms. Zuko and Suki had left for the Fire Nation shortly following their defeat of Gato, with both he and Lao Beifong in tow. It had been considered that Lao should be taken to Ba Sing Se or his native Gaoling, but the Beifongs had many friends in the Earth Kingdom, and Toph did not yet trust his newly proclaimed aspirations for atonement enough to risk it. In the Fire Nation, Zuko, Suki and the Kyoshi Warriors could better keep an eye on him, in case the Sundial Collective wanted to tie up any loose ends. And with he and Gato together, through questioning them both, they hoped a better picture might be painted of the Collective’s greater designs.</p><p>“What do we do about Cranefish?” Sokka had asked Aang and Zuko as their preparations for departure had neared an end.</p><p>“The Business Council will be dissolved, for starters,” Zuko had said. “It was never tenable to begin with. The people here deserve better.”</p><p>“What then?”</p><p>That had been when Aang piped up. “I think we already know. We combine the colonies.”</p><p>“Like the Business Council planned to do?” Sokka asked.</p><p>“No. No, we forge them into something better.”</p><p>Zuko nodded. “A republic.”</p><p>Such was how they left Cranefish City. With a vision for a more hopeful future. For now, that was enough. In the meantime, they would rest.</p><p>Sokka didn’t so much as open the door to their room as he fell through it. Shafts of orange sunlight shone through the shutters, which neither he nor Toph could be bothered to close. He fell through the light as he dropped onto the bed. “What a day,” he said, his voice muffled by the sheets.</p><p>Toph fell on top of him, her head between his shoulder blades, the sudden weight of her body prompting a dull ache in his ribs—the sole reminder of the numerous wounds Katara had repaired. It was still hard to believe, this new intimacy of theirs. It surprised him still, surprised them both. But they took to it well enough.</p><p>Sokka rolled over, once Toph pushed herself up enough to give him the space, and he took her face in a hand. She fit there so naturally. So naturally he laughed.</p><p>“What?” she asked. Her breath was a bloom on his face.</p><p>“Nothing, just… Happy I get to do this whenever I want to now.”</p><p>“You were waiting that long, huh?” There was banter in her tone, but by how she leaned into his hand, she had been waiting plenty long herself.</p><p>As if to taunt him, his thoughts drifted to when next they would be called to action. When next the world would demand more of them, stir them from their rare respites. But, for the moment, the seconds could stretch to hours, and they could rest an eternity for a night. As deft hands began to do their work, the cares of a world that would once again call upon them slipped away, if only for a little while. And that was enough.</p><p>“Stop,” she said.</p><p>He did at once. “Is something wrong? Are you alright?”</p><p>“Yeah, no, I’m fine, just… Look, I haven’t really… done this before.”</p><p>“Never liked anyone enough?”</p><p>“Never trusted anyone enough. Not enough to be the only thing I can see.”</p><p>“I mean… Did you… Did you want to move onto the floor?”</p><p>“S’a little crass of you.”</p><p>“I just wanna help!”</p><p>“I’m kidding, dumbass. No. Stay here. Just…”</p><p>“I will.”</p><p>“You will?”</p><p>“I will. Always.”</p><p> </p><p>The sun was low, now. Setting on a world different from the one it had risen over. Aang, in one of his moments of philosophizing, poured over that thought.</p><p>Everything would be different soon. They stood now at the threshold of the future, and the union of the colonies would be the first step through to a world a little more together than this one. Aang quickly quelled the rare arrogance that had invited the thought, but he wondered if his successor would keep it all together.</p><p>“Can I ask you something?” Aang said.</p><p>“Of course,” Katara said. She lay against his side. He felt the thrum of her voice in his chest.</p><p>“This republic that Zuko and I are thinking of,” he began, “I don’t know if I’m the right person to lead it.”</p><p>“Why’s that?”</p><p>“There’ll be more benders and non-benders living with one another than there’s ever been in… well, ever. It’ll be a whole new world.”</p><p>“One where people aren’t divided by Nation anymore,” Katara completed the thought for him. “Only bender and non-bender status.”</p><p>“Exactly. On one hand, it makes sense for non-benders to be a little cautious of benders. With the wrong people, the world itself is a weapon. And on the other hand, benders might have good reason to be afraid for their lives, because non-benders might have come to associate people like Sozin, Ozai, Liling and the Dai Li with us.</p><p>“And then there’s The Avatar, who, before now, was a bender of no Nation, because they’ve always been of all Nations. When those barriers aren’t what differentiate us anymore… How can I mediate conflict when the Avatar can be considered the most dangerous bender of all? How can I keep what happened in Cranefish City—twice—from happening again?”</p><p>Katara exhaled a thoughtful sigh. “That’s a big question. I’m not sure there’s an answer for it. At least not yet. But it’s a question the world has to face. We can’t let ourselves be paralyzed by the possibilities of what change might bring, because if we just keep things the way they are, the same problems will arise again and again, and answers won’t just fall into our laps.</p><p>“Every problem has answers. This new republic is the answer to the problems we saw in Cranefish. With it will come more problems, sure, but when the time comes, answers will too. Change is the answer, Aang.” She turned to face him, a smile alighting her face. “And we’ll face it together.”</p><p>Aang could do nothing but marvel at her. He smiled back, and their lips met before they settled back into one another. “Hope the next Avatar has someone as smart as you to keep them in line.”</p><p>Katara laughed. “Do you think about your next life a lot?”</p><p>Aang froze.</p><p>
  <em>On top of that tower, it was the only thing I could think of. </em>
</p><p>“Aang?”</p><p>He nodded like he was breaking out of a suit of ice. “Sometimes.”</p><p>“What do you think of when you do?”</p><p>Not later. Not anymore. Now.</p><p>“When I was on top of Gato’s tower, I thought I was going to die.”</p><p>Katara rose from him. Just enough to look him in eyes that wouldn’t look back yet.</p><p>“Gato hoped I would panic and enter the Avatar State, like I said,” he continued. “But I didn’t, because I knew what I would risk. I would endanger the entire world. I wouldn’t be able to come back. I wouldn’t be able to find you.”</p><p>Katara blinked.</p><p>“That was the only thing I could think of.” He knew it was selfish—wasn’t it?—but he knew it was true, too. He met her eyes. “Listen to me. No matter what happens, I’ll find you. Wherever you are, whoever I am, until we the world’s changed so much it doesn’t even look like ours anymore…” Aang cursed the tears he tried to keep at bay. “…I’ll find you. Again and again and again.”</p><p>Tears welled in Katara’s eyes, too. She leaned her head against his. “And I’ll be waiting.”</p><p> </p><p>“What’s this one from?”</p><p>Their bodies flush, Sokka’s hand wandered Toph’s back, his fingertips finding the ridges of scar tissue, spots where the skin would turn coarse and puckered. The sun was well below the horizon now and the room was dark.</p><p>“Hard to say,” she hummed. Her hair fell across his neck in silky ribbons.</p><p>“Is this from when you and Zuko closed the Breach on those marauders camped out in the Taihua Mountains?”</p><p>“No,” Toph guided his hand lower and to her side, “that’s this one. The other one’s from when we got ambushed by those Yuyan chumps, I think.”</p><p>“In Wulong, that’s right. Archers holed up there after Zuko disbanded them. That was a mean fight.”</p><p>“Your turn.” Toph ghosted her fingertips across his chest until she found another scar to question, stopping when she found one on his collarbone. “This one. How’d you get this one?”</p><p>The recollection of it earned a laugh. “Assassination attempt, if you can believe it.”</p><p>“I can’t.”</p><p>“Oh, what, I’m not important enough to assassinate?”</p><p>Toph’s laughter filled the room.</p><p>“Some guys looking to depose my dad back home,” Sokka continued after taking a moment to enjoy the sound of her laughter, listening for when the cackles would break into lilts. “They tried to take me outta the picture too, but, as you can tell from the dashing rogue before you, they didn’t get very far. Managed to sink a whalebone knife into my collarbone, though.”</p><p>Her hand found another. On his shoulder. “What about this one?”</p><p>“Hey, it’s your turn.”</p><p>“Answer the question.”</p><p>Her fingertips grooved into the dimpled marks that dotted the junction of his shoulder and neck. “Tiger seal bit me. They don’t normally attack people, so he must have been really hungry. Wasn’t the bite I was worried about so much as drowning in freezing water. Good thing I don’t taste good.”</p><p>The smile on Toph’s face was gone. Her hands moved more slowly, now, more deliberately. Like they were worried to find another mark. She traced his jaw with a featherweight touch, one that froze with palpable trepidation as she found another. “This one?”</p><p>“Oh, that guy. Yeah, hit myself in the face with my boomerang.”</p><p>Again, she laughed, but it wasn’t the same as the others. Less nostalgic. More somber. “You should be more careful.”</p><p>“Where’s the fun in that?”</p><p>“I’m serious.”</p><p>Sokka realized she wasn’t joking.</p><p>“Promise me you will,” she said.</p><p>“I don’t know if I can.”</p><p>“Then lie to me.”</p><p>Sokka snaked his arms over her back, pulling her into him, against him, so close that neither of them would have to forget what it felt like. “You and me, Toph? We’re gonna grow old together.”</p><p>She smiled sadly. “That’s a nice one.”</p><p>“Good thing it wasn’t a lie.”</p><p>Her only answer was a kiss. Long, a little rough, a little desperate as he kissed her back. Together they smelled like woodsmoke and petrichor, and in that moment, as the whole world stood on the precipice of an uncertain future, Sokka knew one thing was certain.</p><p>And it was all he needed.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>AND THAT'S CURTAINS</p><p>This chapter wouldn't be what it is without my good friend and great editor <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinCanTelephone/pseuds/CameraLux">CameraLux</a>, who so graciously beta read this chapter for me and did an absolutely stellar job of it. Her thoughtful comment on Chapter 4 was also the inspiration for Aang and Katara's conversation at the end, there. Needless to say, she's had a huge impact on this whole story.</p><p>And this whole story wouldn't be what it is without you guys! Thank you to everyone for reading Winds of Rebellion and being so supportive. Your comments and your consistent readership have been insanely encouraging. I couldn't have asked for anything better for my first ATLA project. You guys rock. Smooches.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>You can find me over on Tumblr at <a href="https://vergildidnothingwrong.tumblr.com/">@vergildidnothingwrong</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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